Agendus
26 April 2004
Old habits don't die hard with me. They actually die fairly easily, since I'm always changing and trying new things (a not uncommon characteristic of bipolar disorder). Every so often, I find something that works better than what I had before, and a new habit is born.
Such it is with Agendus. I've tried all the major PalmOS PIMs recently, including none at all, relying soley on Life Balance to keep things in order. Life Balance worked great, but it's missing a few things that I really need to keep my life in order.
In particular, Life Balance really has no contact tracking. I work in sales, and what I do is as important as who I do it for. Or put another way, if I don't have a contact associated with a task, the task is meaningless. Life Balance wasn't helping me track what I was doing for who, and DateBk5 didn't help in that respect either.
The two PalmOS superPIMs, DateBk5 and Agendus, do similar things but with different focus. Generally, when someone asks me which to use (after we've determined that the stock Calendar, Contacts and Tasks aren't getting it done) I answer their question with a question. "After the calendar, which is the more important PIM application to you, tasks or address book?"
If the answer is tasks, then DateBk5 is the better choice. DateBk5 is very task focused, and does a great job of sorting, filtering and otherwise managing your tasks along with your appointments. For many years, this was what I needed. I worked pretty much autonomously in IT, and breaking down my workload into managable steps and then figuring out how to shoehorn them into my day was top priority. Who I delivered to was trivial as it was always the same few people anyway.
Now that I work in sales, the answer to the question changes. I need to keep track of my customers and keep track of what I did for who and when. And for easily linking a contact to an appointment, phone call or task, nothing beats Agendus.
Agendus grew out of Iambic's PIM for the Apple Newton called Action Names. I've tried it on and off for many years, and it wasn't until recently that I really began to appreciate some of the things that make it unique.
Like DateBk5, it presents appointments and tasks together. It has multiple day, week and month views. It provides the ability to have repeating tasks that can recur either on a fixed schedule or a predetermined time after checked off.
DateBk5 supports linking to contacts, but it's a tricky process that I could never master doing quickly. In Agendus, linking to a contact is as easy as writing the contact's name in the New... form. Actually, you don't even have to write the whole name, since Agendus starts filling in matching contact names with the first character.
Unlike other superPIMs, Agendus also serves as a complete contact management application, providing a full contact view along with the appointment and task views. You can sort your contacts by any combination of first name, last name and company, and you can group them by just about any field. This is a big help if you have a lot of contacts within a single company, since you can group them all together in a collapsible list.
Agendus Professional also comes with Iambic's mail client, fully integrating email in with contacts and scheduling a la Outlook. Tapping and holding on any contact brings up a pop up list of actions, including a new email, appointment, task, call and even a history for that contact.
This is the meat of what separates Agendus from the rest of the pack for customer management. The contact history window brings up a list of everything you've done with that person: meetings, calls, tasks, emails, everything. And rather than a static list, which would be useful in and of itself, tapping on any item takes you to it so you can further review any notes or other pertinent information.
In my sales job, I can quickly bring up a contact and see what they've bought, what I've covered with them in training, how often they come in to see me, anything I want to know in the palm of my hand. This gives me all the information I need to do my job and customers think I have an eidetic memory.
Dragging this painfully back to writing, the same tools that work for me in sales work for writers tracking assignments and submissions. Tapping and holding on an editor's name will bring up tasks (submissions and assigments), calls, email correspondence to and from the editor, everything you need.
If you want a tool to handle the business side of writing and get back to the words, Agendus might be the tool for you.
Jeff Kirvin
Jeff@writingonyourpalm.net
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