Mental Garage Sale

A discussion of travel industry website marketing, productivity and lifehacks, technology and training opportunities, and best practices. Geared toward the home-based, small and medium sized travel agency. Personal ramblings, musings and opinions of Chelle Yarbrough, CTC thrown in for free.

Monday, October 30, 2006

The brilliance of being mobile

I'm on my Palm Treo 650, with a popout keyboard, sending a blog post. This may not seem significant, but I'm sitting at a coffeehouse doing it. I've got phone. I've got e-mail through gmail. I've got web through Palm's Blazer. I've got Google Analytics via Documents-to-Go in PDF, I've got MSN Messenger via IM Lite. I've got my library of music through ptunes and - I'm freaking myself out here - I've even got TV through MobiTv AND a butler that calls me madame when I've got a reminder or new urgent e-mail.

The Best Part? I mean the really, really awesome thing? I've got a quad shot Blanco Latte, which is a white chocolate coffee yummy and some portabello mushroom omelette thing in front of me. The sun is shining and I can actually feel it on my lily-white programmers skin.

The beauty is, I've never much felt like technology helped me until today. Sure, it was necessary - work demanded it. But, I've always felt tethered to the office for 16 hours a day, even with wireless. Files were always back at the house. Contacts weren't in my phone, or were in my laptop. My Outlook .pst file became over 2.6 GIG of space to sift through.

So, I switched from Outlook to Gmail, and went web-based in a big way. Big Change, and I love it. Took me 3 minutes to import ALL my contacts from Palm, Outlook and Billing Software.

Next, tackled the Task Management Stuff with an awesome add-on gtdmail.com. Love them Brits. If they could come up with gtgcloset or gtdpantry I'd be happy. Well, I'm happy now. That would DELIGHT me.

Moved on to the Calendar, and landed on google.com/calendar with a little add-on for Palm called companion link for google calendar.

A week's worth of reworking my life and basically, I can leave my office - and my office comes with me for real, without pounds of technology, papers, notebooks, reference and stress. Its exactly what I had in mind when I started. I actually {heart} my company again. Have I said that before? Bears Repeating.

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1 Comments:

kim foster-stringer said...

I would be your forever friend if...actually, you already know I'm your forever friend. But I would be your forever SANE friend if you would teach me just the basics. Like the term "click and drag" means nothing to me. I can master click....but drag? Drag where? I've been fighting this $15 MP3 player I bought my child for Christmas for 2 solid days. I read the reviews on how "simple" it is to download and how "great" it is for the money. Lovely. And I agree, the download was simple. Yet no one mentioned, and it's not in the handbook on how to actually put music on the damn thing. Does the tech industry REALLY think we know all this stuff? Just telling me to click and drag does not tell a successful story here. I've been up since 6am with my coffee and good attitude trying to figure this out. It's now 849am and the 800 customer service support desk isnt open and I've left a very deseperately, needy voicemail on your cell phone. Screw email....call me!!!!!!

8:55 AM  

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