Chapter 4
Organizing your life

Napoleon was one of history's most successful workaholics, and he expected similarly high standards from his generals. Only a busy man, he would tell them, can have spare time. Depending on your mood, you can look at handhelds as helping you organise your busy work around the hospital, or your spare time outside of it. Either way, it would make Napoleon proud. When you buy any handheld, it includes at least four applications. The Palm operating system's designers have named these the Date Book, Address Book, To Do Lists, and Memo. Microsoft uses different names for the Pocket PC, but the Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Notes are almost identical to their Palm counterparts. For simplicity's sake, I shall use Palm's naming when referring to either platform.
Pocket PC Calendar

These four basic applications are the heart and soul of your machine. Although several advanced extensions exist, this suite does a surprising amount while maintaining simplicity.

Date Book or Calendar

Click on the Date Book (Calendar on a Pocket PC) button, and you arrive at your schedule for the day. To add a new event, tap the screen for the time you want it to begin. You can then specify the end time, add an alarm, or 'repeat' the event. I found the latter most useful for regular lectures or clinics. This also works well for anniversaries and events, especially when you take advantage of the alarm to remind you two weeks in advance to get a present. This is great for relationships.

For Palm users, here is another tip for couples: get DualDate. This program is freely downloadable from the Palm website, so get a copy for your machine, and your partner's. Then, you can beam your diaries to each other. DualDate shows both these diaries side by side. In other words, you can keep track of your partner's schedule.

Palm DualDate

Address Book or Contacts

I write everything down in my Address Book (Contacts on a Pocket PC). No scrap of paper escapes this fate: the name of any person whom I meet, contact details of any administrator that I deal with, or directions to any place that I visit. It only takes a minute, and it has paid back immensely. When it came to organising supervisions for finals, I knew which doctors were friendly, and, therefore, whom to ask for help.

My ability to talk to bureaucrats has also improved in leaps and bounds because I now have all their details all the time. Finally, during exams, I was able to visit all the peripheral hospitals at a moment's notice, because I had all the directions and local quirks to hand.

Palm Address Book

I do not recommend storing your private numbers and passwords 'ad hoc' on your handheld. Many people are tempted to use their Address Book for this. Even when the information is stored in a private address record (one that can only be read when the handheld has been unlocked). It is easy to forget to lock your handheld up at the end of a session. The problem is worse when you think about your data backing up on your main computer - security there is not so good, especially with Palm-compatibles.

I do recommend using a program like eWallet. It works on Pocket PCs and Palm-compatibles, and has bullet-proof but convenient security. I trust it with all my credit card details.

To Do Lists or Tasks

With the To Do List (Tasks on a Pocket PC), you can keep track of all the jobs you have to complete. Of course, these can include the daily activities for the wards.

There are also more creative uses for this software. Take books, my other passion. I keep a note of every good book I read about. I give it a rating using the program's Priority function. If ever I am in a library, I check whether they have any of these titles. After a while, if I have not been able find the book free of charge, I can decide to buy it from a bookshop. If I did manage to borrow a book from the library, I can store the date of return and set up an alarm a couple of days earlier.

One other feature to mention is the ability to look at your day's appointments and tasks in one screen. In fact, as you will read in Chapter 12 about the haematology department, highly organised doctors such as Dr Keidan would not leave their paper diary behind until they saw this in action.
Global Date Book diary view on a Palm

Memo or Notes

The Memo (Notes on a Pocket PC) is great for writing scraps of information. Do not underestimate the power of this feature. Pocket PC users can go even further, and use the handhelds to record speech.

My favourite use of the Memo / Notes feature is to write down gems picked up from ward rounds. It is then easy to share these with other students. During exam time, most of my machine becomes devoted to medical snippets.
Pocket PC Notes

If you take one thing from this chapter, it should be the importance of the Find function. Use this to search for anything anywhere on your handheld. Chapter 13 goes over this point further, but consider this simple example. Suppose that, during my revision, I wanted to look up the British Thoracic Society (BTS) guidelines on asthma treatment. If I only had paper, I would pray that I had stored these notes in a sensible place, so I can quickly find them again. On the handheld, however, I would simply write "BTS" into the Find program. Within in a few seconds this would bring up all the memos that I had written about the topic - as long as I had included BTS in my text.

Taking it further

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the Palm Economy allows extensions to your handheld in every way imaginable. For example I use DayNotez as a journal, keeping all my daily memories. It will not take you long to find needs that your machine does not perform by default, but you will no doubt enjoy the search for the solutions. Happy hunting.

Further information

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