Feel free to take and use. (Click for bigger version.)

Most people react to this by saying something like, “Seriously? Index cards.” Yes, seriously. You should probably try it out. And I know several people for whom this PDA works very well!

But I’m not one of them.

Here’s the thing — after literally years trying to get myself to use paper calendars/planners/notebooks/etc., I finally discovered that if my calendar / organizer can’t beep at me, it effectively doesn’t exist.

While trying out the Hipster PDA, I thought I’d finally give it one more shot. See if that was still true. It is.

Sure, I can carefully put everything I want to do today into a planner. I can schedule that appointment for 12:00. And then life will happen, the dean will have a critical project he needs done by tomorrow, I get deep into the zone working on that, and don’t realize until 5:32 pm that we had an appointment at 12:00. That’s pretty much how my life and my brain work.

Furthermore, when you ask me to bring you a document tonight, I’m filing that away in my memory with 32 other things I’m supposed to remember to do by then. 1-17 more are guaranteed to come along before then. Odds are, I’m not bringing your document tonight. Yes, the hPDA is supposed to remind me — if I’m not so absorbed in thinking about the next problem to give it a few minutes. Throughout my test, I only rarely managed to consult my stack of cards effectively. I’m both an easily distract-able and highly focused individual. (Yes, you can be both.)

My solution, the one I’ve been working on for a few years now since I got my first PDA, is to put everything into my digital calendar(s). Events and appointments are obvious, but I also add everything I need to remember later but probably won’t, like “Start walking to class now or you’ll be late”, “Look over the document that Sarah just handed you”, “Respond to Dana’s email”, etc. For things like that, I take my best guess as to when would be a good time to address that matter. 50% of the time I’m wrong, but the reminder brings it back into my consciousness when it would otherwise be lost. Also, it’s easy to tell the reminders to try again later.

I have two calendars: a Google Calendar for more personal and school things, and an Exchange calendar for work-related things. The beauty here is that both calendars live in the cloud — meaning they’re not saved on something I can drop into the sink and destroy forever. And both my phone and computer connect to them, so I’ll always be reminded.

To make things even easier, this month I started using Easy Calendar for the iPhone. I find it much quicker than the default calendar app to add new items, and to see what’s coming up in the next week. Easy Calendar lets you set a default alert for every new item you add, which is good since I add an alert to every single one.

On my computer, I use the aptly named Remind Me Later app (free), which lets me type in natural language, like “Turn in that awesome assignment tonight at 6″ The app is smart enough to know that by “tonight” I mean October 25th, and that “6″ means 6 p.m., and it automatically puts it into my calendar with a reminder.

Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes it’s enough only that the system bring an item back into my working memory after it’s been pushed out by any number of a dozen things.

Will this system work for you? Quite possibly. Is it the right one for you? Maybe. Hard to say. Could be that the Hipster PDA works better for you, for example. If my experiments with productivity techniques have done anything (besides give me some great ideas and tools), they’ve reminded me that I’m a cognitive bird of a somewhat different color. But then, aren’t we all in our own ways?

After a while, as with my implementation of the Pomodoro Technique, by the end I was using my own, trimmed version rather than the full-on set of methods and processes that Merlin Mann lays out.

Basically, every time I check my email, it gets emptied. Completely. This can be easier said than done if you think about it, so here’s the process:

• If an email can be dealt with in less than 5 minutes, I do it right then and there.
• Emails that need follow-up later on, say, after a long project is finished, I put them in a folder called “Follow Up”
• Emails that require me to take action at a later time, like in a week or month, I put the item and relevant information in my calendar and delete or archive the message.
• Once (maybe twice) I go through that Follow Up folder and see if anything needs attention and take care of it.
• I don’t actually delete every single email. The way I’ve gotten used to it, is that as long as the unread messages badge is gone, I’m good. I’ll keep things that might be important for future reference — I can search for it later if I need to.

I’ve found this method really great. It keeps me on top of things. Messages don’t get buried and lost. However, there is one caveat here that I think is pretty major: you must turn your email client off if you’re not using it. (Or close the browser tab.) The reason I say this, is that I became so obsessive about keeping that unread messages badge gone that the drive to check and answer or file every single email as soon as it came through became a problem. It eventually became a constant, nagging interruption to my other work.

So, I decided I would close my Mail app for 1-2 hour stretches while I got work done. Done. Problem solved. Besides, I realized that nothing in my mailbox was so urgent that it couldn’t wait — if it was, someone would call, text, or visit me about it.