You Gotta Pay Attention

I've written here before about dealing with calendars. For the moment, I'm still using my Palm Tungsten E2 as my primary calendar and sync'ing it with iCal on my MacBook Pro. I try to keep everything up-to-date (so to speak), and I'm usually pretty good about that. However, the problem isn't always with data entry...

The University offers a number of courses and seminars to staff members, on a variety of topics. There are courses on management techniques, dealing with elder parents, personal finance, dealing with co-workers, and all sorts of other things. I've signed up for, and attended, a number of these classes and they've all been pretty good. One that looked particularly interesting was entitled "Setting and Keeping Goals." I signed up for it about a month ago and dutifully entered the date and time into my Palm's calendar along with a number of other classes.

Tuesday night, I made an entry into my Palm calendar to remind me to send em EMail message to somebody first thing in the morning. On Wednesday morning, my Palm started beeping and I remembered that I had to send the message. Now, I had earphones plugged into the Palm as it lay on my desk as I had been listening to a few podcasts, so the beeping wasn't too loud. In fact, it was quiet enough for me to easily ignore it as the Palm continued to beep at me all morning. I would sort of hear it and remind myself that I'd already sent the EMail I needed to send. Not once did I even consider openning the case to clear the task.

Around 1:40 PM yesterday, I logged in to my MacBook, where I was greeted by a pop-up from iCal. It turns out that my Palm wasn't beeping because I needed to send an EMail. As you've probably guessed it by now, by ignoring that beeping I had managed to miss my class on Setting and Keeping Goals. You gotta pay attention.....

Technorati Tags: Calendar, iCal, Palm Pilot, Attention