Time Management Tuesday: Take Advantage Of Technology

I am obsessive enough to want to get a little work done when I'm away from home. Not a lot, a little. And I learned recently that technology is my friend when it comes to getting that little done.

The Romance Of The Journal 

 

See that beautiful journal to your right? A birthday gift from my sister a few years back. Journals, whether they're beautiful or not, draw many people. There's something very nineteenth century about them. We imagine writers in days of old simply writing their ideas down in their journals as the ideas came to them and publishing the whole thing. Who needs an editor? Could happen again, right?

Yeah, I'm not all that romantic. What I was using my beautiful journal for last year was that little bit of work I wanted to do when I was away from home. I did some essay attempts in an airplane on my way home from Seattle. I wrote drafts of several reader response blog posts while I was waiting for a family member who was having surgery. I thought I was making excellent use of time away from home.

And then I lost the journal.

Okay, I lost it in my office (it turned up a week or so ago) which is not that severe a loss and also speaks volumes about the state of my work environment. Nonetheless, the journal, and the work I had done with it, was as good as gone for...I don't even know how long. I don't know when I lost it. Hell, I didn't know I had lost it until I found it.

If You Want Real Romance, Get An IPad

Last summer, I got an iPad. I will spare you the details of my relationship with this thing, of my plan to one day have it contain my entire life. For our purposes, all I need to do is tell you about my iPad on retreat week.

Yes, that's right. I'm still talking about my retreat week. The one that came at the beginning of January. It was just that good.

The beauty of the iPad is that it connects you to the Internet, which, you must admit, a journal does not. In January I underpainted some blog posts directly into my blog. Instead of having to copy them over from a traditional journal after I got home, all I had to do was edit them. Marketing ideas...submission plans...story ideas...I e-mailed them to my laptop, which is where all those things are stored. No transcribing them from a paper and pen journal onto the laptop. I cut and past from the e-mails. Cut and past...faster!!!

Whatever you do with a journal is left stuck in the journal. With an iPad, you can do something with whatever you do. And I haven't even looked into using the Pages feature. Though I didn't care for Notes.

Yes, if you're very patient and have very little or supple fingers you can do this with your phone.

In addition to the things this iPad can do that the journal can't, I've had it for seven months. It's barely out of my sight. I do not lose it, because I use it for more than I used that journal for.

I love tech. What more can I do with this thing?