The Franklin Planner software integrates with your Palm device to assist you in meeting the challenges of this process. Before you purchase it for yourself, however, you should note that the software is designed to be compatible with a Palm III or later version of the Palm organizer.

"If you make the commitment to use the Franklin Planner, you can no longer use your Palm desktop software."

Also, when installing the software onto your desktop, a warning is given that continuing the installation will overwrite your current Palm desktop application. When a coworker and I installed the software onto our computers, we both lost all of our Palm desktop records. Take the warning seriously before progressing with the installation. If you make the commitment to use the Franklin Planner, you won't be able to use your Palm desktop software anymore, unless you HotSync on multiple machines and only keep the Franklin Planner software on one.

The best way to ensure pain-free installation of the Franklin Planner software is to perform a HotSync so that anything you've done in the Palm Desktop is saved into your device, and all records are up to date. Then, uninstall your Palm Desktop, install the Franklin Planner stuff, and HotSync again. Violate this procedure at the expense of a long tech support call.

If you synchronize your data at home and at work, but perhaps you share your home computer with another user who doesn't want to use the Covey stuff, you can leave the Palm Desktop software running at home and have the Franklin Planner software running at work. You can safely synchronize your device with both. Franklin's Daily Task List won't show up on your home machine and Palm's To Do List won't show up at work, but all the data from your Date Book and your Address List will be complete in both places. Since the Franklin Planner's Daily Task List is a little more useful to me than Palm's To Do List (I'll explain why later), I changed my Button Preferences, wiring the one that usually takes you to the built-in To Do List to the Task List, instead. My computer at work, the one that has the Franklin Planner software on it, has an up-to-date copy of my Task List on it.

There are nine key applications that you can download to your Palm device: Daily Task List, Master Task List, Daily Record of Events, Values, Roles, Mission, Goals, and Weekly Compass. I'll give personal examples to illustrate how some of these applications are put to work.

Discover
During the discovery phase, the idea is to discover what matters most to you by considering your values, your roles, and your personal mission statement. The Franklin Planner desktop software includes various Wizards to help you with the process, as you can see in Figure B.

FIGURE B

The Wizards available on the Franklin Planner desktop help you define yourself. Click picture for a larger image.

The Franklin Planner desktop applications sync with their Palm device counterparts. This allows you to reflect on what you've learned about yourself later, during the planning phase of the process.