Palm Desktop or MS Outlook

[flaten@chapman.edu]

Hello,
Which do you recommend using? MS Outlook or Palm Desktop?
Just this week I began using Outlook after purchasing David's GTD and Outlook book. It even inspired me to ditch my iPAQ and buy a Palm T|X.
I happened to open up the Palm Desktop and it looks sooooooo much better aesthetic-wise. The Palm Desktop appears to have the same functions that David refers to in his GTD and Outlook book.
Any suggestions you have on what to do would be received gratefully.
Thanks.
Eric Flaten

 

[mcogilvie]

I happened to open up the Palm Desktop and it looks sooooooo much better aesthetic-wise. The Palm Desktop appears to have the same functions that David refers to in his GTD and Outlook book.

Use Outlook if a) you are required to; b) you want email integration; c) you want to/need to fiddle. Use Palm Desktop if you want simple and clean. You can always use your Palm to switch data between them if you switch back and forth a few times.

 

[TesTeq]

No e-mail integration!

The Palm Desktop appears to have the same functions that David refers to in his GTD and Outlook book.

Palm Desktop has no e-mail integration. And in my opinion PalmOS is dying.

 

[SalesDave]

Palm Desktop has no e-mail integration. And in my opinion PalmOS is dying.

Shame on you. Palm will life forever. Pocket PC will die first.:mrgreen:

I would recommend using Outlook. It has a lot more functionality than Palm Desktop

 

[stevewed]

DA has a nice pdf around here somewhere about how he has set up Palm to handle his contexts/lists. I started with this as a basic setup and it has worked fine for me. I find that any sort of uber-program gets me too caught up in that program. The more I think about a program and how to use it, the further away I get from mind like water.

 

[tominperu]

For me, the problems with Palm have been:

1) There is limit to the number of categories which is a pain for someone like me who likes to have lots of categories.

2) My Palm had a few bugs, ie it would always put in a future date for a to do due date even if you chose "no date". This made it a chore to use but maybe I was unlucky.

3) I like to have a subfolder in Outlook Tasks for someday/maybes. There is no way you can do this in the Palm.

If you haven't experienced any of the above problems then I'd say go with Palm. I agree it has a much simpler and pleasing appearance.

 

[Cpu_Modern]

I never used Outlook. What I liked about the Palm desktop was the way you could configure "Views". One such "view" would be the exact position, size, font ect of one window, what items to show (filters) and so on.

 

[Ruud]

GTD is extremely flexible in which tools you can use.

Unfortunately the tools themselves are very rigid, very inflexible.

Whichever one you go with, Outlook or Palm Desktop or simply paper, at one point and another you'll run into limitations imposed on you, GTD in general and your specific implementation of GTD.

These limitations will shape your implementation of GTD. Often, at least in the beginning of your GTD journey, this will make you switch at one point to another application. Try it there, at the end of the rainbow Finally, after having tried several setups and even combinations of setups, you'll decide to pick one and sort of stick with it.

 

[Barry]

When in doubt, go with the simpler solution. That would point to the Palm Desktop. I would only use Outlook if you are already managing your email with Outlook and your email is generating a lot of input for your GTD system.