One morning, a friend beeped.
The heavens opened, the angels sang and a bright light shone that seemed to illuminate the One True Way with two true words:
Palm Pilot.
Because it was his Palm Pilot that had beeped, summoning him to an engagement with a brisk efficiency that dangled before me the dizzying possibility of personal planning paradise.
And I seek that paradise, that organizational utopia glistening in the distance, a vision as gorgeous as the end of a rainbow and just as elusive.
My fellow seekers and I are not just looking for a date book. We are looking for salvation.
We are crusaders for the Holy Grail of life planning, devout believers that somewhere, there exists the perfect tool that will take a volcano of a life and turn it into a placid prairie.
Our search has stoked what Day-Timer’s Inc. estimates to be a more than $900 million-a-year paper-based planner market.
Technology has added all sorts of organizational bells and whistles to the mix: Watches that beep, e-mail programs that allow you to send reminders to yourself.
But it is the appearance of the electronic Palm Pilot, made by 3Com Corp., that has organizational faiths wavering in earnest.
Behold the magnetic pull of this hand-held organizer that contains addresses, date books and hopes and dreams of the 5 million people who have bought them since they were introduced in 1996.
“It’s changed my life,” said Tracy Beltrano, an orthodontist’s office manager from Wilmette, who was forgetting to pick her children up from school before she got a Palm. “I truly believe in it.”
Hear the testimony of the newly baptized Palm People, with styluses poised and demeanors a colleague described as “one step away from drinking the Kool-Aid”:
“I am in love,” gushed one testimonial posted on a company Web site. “They will have to pry my Palm III Organizer from my cold, dead fingers,” declared another.
Paper planner people can be equally passionate, not to mention crotchety.
“It’s a very personal product. If we make any changes in our formats, people get very angry at us,” said John Hayek, senior vice president of marketing, office products division, of the At-A-Glance Group.
“People are lost without their books,” said Karen Muller, marketing strategy manager for Day Runner Inc. “They say, `If it’s not in my book, it’s not in my life.’ “
For seven years — you can check my boxed archives — my life has been governed by my Franklin Planner.
The most cultish of the systems, Franklin is a goal-setting and time management program whose good news is spread in 60,000 seminars, most of them daylong, that the company gives every month around the country.
Franklin’s promise could not be loftier. “The central theme of the seminars is the acquisition and maintenance of inner peace,” said Hyrum Smith, the system’s creator and vice co-chair of Franklin Covey Co., which is based in Salt Lake City.
Even for a less-than-orthodox member of the faith like myself, the organizational system worked. But there was a heavy price to pay, literally. My Franklin Planner grew so huge that I stopped carrying it. And the organizationally obsessive know that if you don’t have your schedule on you, you might as well not have a schedule.
It was my husband who suggested apostasy. Why not switch to a Palm Pilot? I would have everything with me all the time in a tiny device, and could download stuff from the Internet, besides.
I recoiled at the thought. Me, convert? My life was in my Franklin Planner, not to mention receipts I need for the expense account I should have filed in September. How could I stray?
I sought spiritual counsel from friends and colleagues, and soon detected an ugly undercurrent of intolerance.
Frankly, there are Paper People who regard Palm People as techno-snots. What’s the difference between a Palm Person and a Rolodex Person, sniffed one paperish friend? Long silences from the screen-tapping Palm Pilot Person when you ask for a phone number.
And the Paper People were divided into small sects like the Yellow Pad People, the Sticky Note People and the Scrap-of-Paper people, a.k.a. atheists, each of which had their own dogma.
But I donned my chain mail armor and crusaded over to see the Palm Pilot in person at, of all places, the Franklin Covey store on North Michigan Avenue.
For in a vaguely Jews-for-Jesus kind of arrangement, Franklin sells Palm Pilots and PC software that allows people (non-Mac people, that is) to follow both the Palm and Franklin faiths. It is a violation of the classic Franklin admonition to forsake all other planning products, but a shrewd marketing move.
Nearby, a convert beckoned surreptitiously. “I switched to Palm a year ago,” he whispered. “I haven’t touched paper since.”
But I love touching paper. The delicious scratch of a fine pen on high-quality paper is catnip to me.
I swayed between preachers, Franklin on the one side, Palm on the other, until I saw a blinding light:
Filofax!
Yes, several friends urged, solve your portability troubles with a pocket-sized Filofax, from the line of pricey but gorgeous binders and refills made by a British company that has been acquired by Day Runner Inc. in a kind of reverse-schism deal.
So I bought a tiny, gleaming, black leather Filofax. I could, of course, have bought a wire-bound Week-At-A-Glance for $50 less, as my spouse pointed out emphatically, but didn’t, on the theory that the more pretty and expensive an item is, the more motivated I will be to use it.
And I was happy — until I heard that beep.
I could not get that beep out of my mind. It is an application people find either wondrous or appalling: You can program a Palm Pilot to beep you minutes or hours before an appointment.
It is an electronic nudge, an everpresent mother, a technological kick in the butt. And it is a solution to the most serious drawback of any paper planner.
They all have a crucial weak link: You. It doesn’t matter what is on your to-do list if you forget to look at it.
The beepee, my friend TQ White II, a Web site programmer who lives in Oak Park, offered his testimony.
Formerly a strict Frankliner, he used to listen to Hyrum Smith’s time management tapes in the car, to his children’s agony.
But last May, he converted. The paper planner “was simply too much cubic footage to carry around,” he said.
Now he carries his Palm everywhere, including a block party where he recorded a chance business contact at 2 a.m. in someone’s front yard. He downloads entire books into it and reads, backlighting the screen if necessary.
“I had a fine experience in the summertime laying in my hammock in the back yard in the pitch dark, reading my book,” he said. “It was really great.”
And I was really sold. Yes! I would renounce my paper-based faith, and adopt an electronic one. Glory be to the Palm!
My husband presented me with the slim Palm V for Hanukkah. I plugged it into my Macintosh — a critical selling point is that Palms connect with computers — and began typing in my schedule.
It was easy. And fun. Giddily, I entered tasks and assigned them color-coded categories. For two hours I played with the thing, making up new categories and picking colors — red for medical? pink for personal? — until, at midnight, I woke my husband.
“I love this thing,” I whispered. “Oh, my god,” he groaned.
Unfortunately, I forgot to make my daughter’s lunch and she had to beg from other children the next day. But I was in full obsession mode, tapping and beeping while envious friends asked if they could watch.
I even fiddled with my Palm while I was getting dressed, to the shock of my spouse when he encountered me checking the screen while wearing only my pants.
“Was it telling you to put your blouse on?” my friend Johanna, a Franklin stalwart, inquired when she heard of the incident.
Let people laugh; I was having a fine time beeping myself, downloading Pac Man, and checking out currency-conversion and city-map programs.
“It’s like getting a Barbie,” remarked a friend who downloads several newspapers’ front pages onto her Palm every morning. “You get to buy all the accessories.”
And my Palm performed miracles. Those beeps got me to the ice rink to pick up my daughter two minutes early. Hallelujah!
But I still could not wean myself off my paper planner. Quick reminders, phone messages, lengthy notes for work — they were all easier and faster to do by hand.
It is quicker to turn a page than turn on a device and tap a screen several times. Nothing beats the instant, graphic comprehensibility of a full-page, detailed monthly schedule, which the Palm screen is too small to reproduce.
And just try planning a summer vacation with a Palm, tapping from month to month instead of being able to look at a year on a single paper-calendar page.
That sound you hear is the paper planner company executives gloating.
“Not only can you flip around and get instant access to things . . . but mine always has an extra car key in the zippered pouch,” said Andrew Roth, president of Filofax Inc., which is nonetheless looking into some sort of marriage with electronic planners.
“The Palm Pilot is a wonderful thing,” said Franklin Covey’s Smith. But when it comes to writing at length, “you have to learn to write reformed Egyptian to make it work.”
At this point, I was using a Palm Pilot, Franklin Planner and Filofax simultaneously, a one-woman triple intermarriage trying to decide which faith I would settle on.
My beautiful Filofax fell by the wayside, but only because I had chosen one too small to function as more than a date book. The fact that I don’t use it makes me weep, and my husband seethe.
Which left the Franklin Planner and the Palm. And I was just about to declare a kind of tie, on the grounds of each having strengths and weaknesses, when I was forced to confront the issue of mortality.
My Palm Pilot died.
It froze while I was trying to download a quick note program. I pressed buttons, I tried to turn it off, I tapped on it like Fred Astaire, but it was dead as a doornail.
And I remembered the sage words of At-A-Glance’s John Hayek, which I had dismissed while in the full flush of electronic love.
“There’s always that latent fear that something electronic will break down,” he said. “The paper product will always be there.”
And so it was, there on my desk, faithfully awaiting my penstroke and, frankly, looking a little smug, while my Palm lay in a coma awaiting a return e-mail from the Palm Computing support staff.
I ended up figuring out how to reset it myself. But I was humbled. Nirvana should not require reading a manual.
I still love the Palm, for the fun, the beeps and the fact that it turns into a kind of Game Boy for the kids during restless moments. And I have only begun to explore its possibilities.
But a paper planner seems destined to remain my workhorse. I suspect I will use both, in the best approximation I can manage of that utopian vision that haunts me yet.
I have not found the Holy Grail. Planning heaven will have to wait. My search led me, in the end, to the words of Todd Simons, director of Franklin Covey’s handheld planner business.
“Is there one tool that is perfect?” he said. “The answer is no. Not yet.”
This pilgrim is waiting.
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PLANNERS AT A GLANCE
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Palm Pilot
An electronic, handheld personal organizer. A date book, schedule keeper, notepad, e-mail reader and, through thousands of pieces of third-party software, anything from a daily newspaper to a stopwatch. The Palm VII offers wireless access to the Internet. Prices range from $179 to $499.
Franklin Planner
The obsessive-compulsive’s dream planner. A way of life in a loose-leaf binder, or just an exhaustively efficient organizer with add-on refills ranging from shopping list forms to garden journals. Binders and refills range from $38 to $263.
Franklin Covey also sells Palm Pilots and binders that hold both a Palm and paper pages. It also offers software that allows you to use the Franklin system on your computer. Palms can connect to computers, and this program lets you print information from your Palm onto pages that can be inserted into a Franklin paper binder. The software is PC only; Macintosh users are out of Franklin luck.
Filofax
A luxury line of organizers, with binders made of buttery leather, lizard or ostrich. Binder prices range from $45 to $1,095 for the genuine American farmed alligator. Can be customized with maps, diskette holders and even a menstrual calendar.
At-A-Glance Group
Those slim, flexible, wire-bound Day-At-A-, Week-At-A- and Month-At-A-Glance books are unrivaled for portability, and start at under $10. The company also sells a leather-like folio that incorporates what it calls a “Planning Platform” and a “Communications Platform,” techno-speak for a “date book” and an “address book.”
Day Runner
Loose-leaf binder system that attracts more women users than men. There are 100 different refills and accessories, ranging from sheet protectors to receipt envelopes, with prices ranging from $12.99 to $250. The company also has PC software.
Day-Timer
Founded in 1949 as a planner for lawyers, Day-Timer sells binders and refills ranging from totals of $19.99 to $141.99. Day-Timer also sells software so customers can use both the paper system and a PC.
