FIGURE B

Never liked the lines on notebook paper in school? You can get rid of them in Date Book by setting identical Start and End times.

Where does the time go? Find out!
The techniques I've mentioned so far are great for streamlining your Date Book use, shaving off a few seconds here and there without repeating many of the same routines. But what about the bigger picture? How can you use the Date Book to significantly improve your overall time management system?

Fortunately, it doesn't involve shelling out big bucks for the latest Ultra Executive Deluxe Embossed Leather Notebook Organizer (notebook paper, calendar paper, plastic separators, and set of 12 audio tapes not included). You're holding the solution in the palm of your hand.

The first step to managing your time is to find out where it's going. Some of us can sit down and begin working immediately, pausing only for coffee and lunch. There are also a good many of us who are easily distracted by any stimuli even remotely interesting ("My day really can't begin until I go check out those new Hubble Space Telescope images ooh, and animations too! Maybe it's time I brushed up on my astrophysics"). [Hey, no picking on PalmPower's editors! How did you know we do that kind of stuff? --DG]

Designate a week during which you'll track every hour of the day, so you can analyze that time later.

You can do this easily in Date Book. In addition to scheduling your upcoming appointments, write down activities as you start and end them. To keep them separate from your regular events, I suggest prefacing each entry with a special symbol, as shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C

To make it easier to differentiate between appointments and tracked items, use a special character (such as ~) to indicate your time tracking.

If you don't currently use the Palm organizer's security features, you can mark the events as Private and then select Hide Private Records in the built-in Security application, which will make your time-tracking entries invisible and separate from your important meetings.

Entering your activities each hour can also be a good opportunity to attach notes to the event for reference later. Tap the Note button in the Event Details screen, or select Attach Note (Command-A) from the Record menu.

[I've often used this technique as a manager. If I'm not sure how one of my reports (a "report" in manager lingo is one who reports to me) is using her time (or I'm trying to see if I can increase her workload), I'll often ask her to keep track of all her time for a week. It's amazing what discoveries I find. I once discovered an assistant still doing a task every day that had, in reality, become irrelevant more than six months earlier. But I'd completely forgotten to remove the task from her list of assignments, and she'd never thought to tell me she was still doing it. We've recovered almost an hour of her time per day! -- DG]

After the week is over, take the opportunity to go back and review your tracks. Depending on your level of organization, discovering where your time went can be a painful realization. Luckily, the process of analyzing your week doesn't have to be painful: you can just print it out. Perform a HotSync to update your Palm Desktop records, make sure the Date Book module is selected, and select Print from the File menu (or press Ctrl/Command-P). Under Print Options, choose Dates (List Format). Only the days with events on them will print in a convenient list format.