Taking your work home with you
That need to manage the data of our lives didn't just take control of our psyche overnight. It has been successfully cultivated over the past decade by the behaviors we exhibit at work. As we return home from our jobs with our PDAs in our briefcases, sometimes mounted to the air-vents in our cars, always on--we begin to blur the line between personal data and business data. Our work contacts are mixed with our friends' phone numbers, our reminder to get milk is given the same priority as finishing the presentation for tomorrow's sales meeting.

No wonder the line between our personal data and our business data is blurring when so many companies require their employees to purchase their own PDAs. When we're forced to purchase (or we're given, if you work for a more enlightened company) our own devices to use at work, we feel even more obligated to use it as much as possible, to cross boundaries. So we have it on the coffee table when we return from work. We wield our styli at the dinner table and in front of the TV. And our spouses watch. And our kids watch.

And as the styli fly across the tiny screen, making the gentle tapping sound acquired only through experienced use, there's discussion about how the PDA can keep us all better organized, about how husband and wife or mother and daughter can beam information to each other, whether it be important dates or contact information.

Suddenly, everyone in the family wants one.

We each want one for our own reasons, but ultimately for one shared dream: managing the data of our lives.

Life data
And with this growing extension of office behavior into the home come the applications. Even as I write this, software vendors are dreaming up new programs to help people manage all the data in their personal lives, store it, retrieve it, organize it, and yes, even analyze it.

One such company, Keyoe, Inc (at http://www.keyoe.com) even professes in their tagline, "Software to enhance and organize your life." Their primary product, Diet and Exercise Assistant, is designed to help body-conscious people track everything they eat (including calorie intake, fat intake, etc.) against their exercise regimen and their weight.

The result is a well-laid plan for losing a certain amount of weight by a certain time (even with graphs). It's the analysis of our "life data."

This application is the ultimate in personal data management. We organize and manage the very food we consume to function as biological organisms. Perhaps it is, like the paper planner in the beginning, a little anal. But it's exciting to see such a program developed because it epitomizes the profound shift in existence of the PDA within our culture and society (and it's cool).

It's not hard to imagine Diet and Exercise Assistant on my boss's PDA. Nor is it hard to imagine that at lunch he'd be tapping away at the screen, logging all his food and drink so that he could better analyze his weight-loss goals.

Diet and Exercise Assistant empowers a PDA for our lives (where business and personal have become synonymous with "managing data"). Of course there are a number of other "calorie intake" applications as well as "exercise-tracking" applications. This shift in the PDA will generate a new host of competitors.