The experiment (parts two & three)

The experiment is going well and avoiding my PDA has become surprisingly easy. As the days have passed I am starting to realise just how much my life seems to revolve around my PDA rather than how it should be- my PDA should be helping me manage my life.  

I have been reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (as usual everything by him is excellent) and it is a ‘real’ paper book! I tend to read a few pages of an eBook every day but this week alone I have read over 300 pages. One reason for that is that I seem to have more time now that I am not using the PDA (ironic) and another is probably because I am more relaxed without it and not wondering what else needs to be done, what I should be doing in the next few days blah blah blah.

Not reading eBooks causes some compromises such as the inability to read in the dark. I am a notoriously bad sleeper and when I wake up reading a few pages can help get me back to sleep. Has anyone invented a device that illuminates the pages of a paper book to allow reading in the dark? First person to suggest a torch gets banned from the forumJ

The other strange thing I do is watch movies and TV episodes on the Treo or Nokia E61. Without doubt this is great when stuck in a hotel room or away from home but I own a PSP so should really just move these films over to that when the need arises. When at home not watching a DVD on the TV seems completely daft to me now and was another example of using the PDA just because the PDA could perform that function rather than using the best tool for the job.

My other main reason for using a PDA was to keep track of financial records and my bank account. It is nice having that information to hand but again I have internet banking which lists every transaction and I can use a spreadsheet to update business account etc. After only a few days I am wondering why I needed a PDA for that task.

I realise that this is all sounding like I suddenly hate PDAs but that is not the case at all. In my view they are one of the single most useful and important developments of the past two decades and it is a shame that the masses have not cottoned on to this fact. The issue for me is that my usage was completely over the top and getting to the point of being obsessive. It is only during this experiment that I realise that fact.

I was going to make this a series of five articles looking at life without a PDA but this will be the final part. I will revisit this subject at a later date but safe to say that at this time I am going to try living without the majority of PDA functions for a while to come.

My conclusions are as follows after one week without a PDA-

• I do not miss it at all
• I have a lot more free time (due to not recovering from errors and tweaking it constantly)
• I appear to have more control- writing things down makes the information stay in my head and I remember what needs to be done. After so long just typing away and forgetting the entry until the alarm pops up I had lost that ability
• I am surprisingly a lot more relaxed about things. I do not try to do too much and just refer to my notebook on occasion to check some details
• Paper does as good a job for personal information management as a PDA

So, it’s all good? Well, obviously not. I still use my PDAs for review writing, freelance work and software testing but I am no longer so reliant on a little piece of electronic that went with me everywhere. I have no doubt that I will start to forget things and there lies the main benefit to me of trying to live without a PDA.

I no longer worry about forgetting to do something or being late for a conference call or meeting- it is human to forget things and in many ways perfectly healthy. The PDA made sure I forgot nothing and subsequently turned me into an organic version of itself. That may sound ridiculous but it is how I feel and for the moment at least I will do my best to avoid mine.

This in no way affects PDA247 and my passion for these devices and this market is still there. I just can’t get the thought out of my head that a new type of PDA is needed to not only bring these devices to the mass market but to stop people like me becoming over reliant on them. I will continue to think about this and will in due course publish my thoughts but a more ‘human’ type of PDA would be a giant leap forward for this market.