Musings Of A New Doc

After using Outlook, PDAs, task management softwares, reminders and syncing, I finally stumbled upon this great innovation of the bygone era. Not just serendipity, its about managing life without the techie fuss, naturally

Given my peculiar habit of instantly forgetting stuff as soon as they go out of my sight, I have been mightily concerned about keeping all things in my visual axis. Keeping things in order has been my lifeline –not long after my obsession with order wanes, I start losing my precious possessions like phone, steth, pens, wallet, pen, and ID documents,  while not mentioning the utter chaos it brings to my studies and hobbies.

Given that I am still a student, and that too of medicine, I have tried and tested really a broad range of technologies to promptly remind me of my duties. I had my first digital organizer when I was in grade sixth. My next big digital leap was Outlook on my computer, and then came the Pocket PC. Right now, I am juggling between various apps on my iPhone, task manager on my Outlook, Google Calendar, while using multiple syncing apps to keep all of it on the same page. This new ‘invention’ which I personalized for myself, is the latest addition in the arsenal.

Given my penchant for digital displays, going back to the paper is refreshing. It is also surprisingly effective. I realized that while phones and computers can do some remarkable feats, you can’t talk to them as intuitively the way you can talk to paper with a pen. Hence was born a simple, wooden plank, where you can move about your text boxes as easily as on OneNote, attach files and photos just like you would on Evernote, and manage your To-dos a lot more naturally than on Outlook.



This simple board with multi-colored thumb-pins and A4 sized folded paper works so well because it allows a spatial distribution of the important assignments I am running . Unlike Outlook or Evernote or iPhone Notes that gives a one list of your notes and tasks, this board adds a further dimension to your life planning without straining a Core2Duo processor. To me, its an archaic version of OneNote. But given that this works so well at such low cost, I wonder whether the term has any validity for it. May be I should say that OneNote is a digital imitation of this old fashioned board.

I use a different colored thumb-pins to projects that are faring differently –the red ones need the most urgent attention while the white ones are going smoothly. Plus, the ones on top are currently on top of my mind while the one lower down are at in the backburner of my brain.



It sounds novel to talk about old school classics in the era of such modernity. But at the same time, all modern innovations center around one key concept –effectiveness. This home-made product certainly beats any latest software upgrades from Microsoft or the likes at effectiveness, but probably that’s just because I handcrafted it.