I posted a list of things that I Will… do in 2010.  They are goals, not resolutions.  What about the things I’d like to do longer term?

Well, 43 Things is a pretty simple little online tool with an iPhone app that lets you write, update, track and share your goals as well as encouraging others and sharing tips on how to achieve your goals.  You can have goals for 2010 and life goals.  It’s free and simple.

I’m ‘stewcut‘ if you want to keep tabs on me and I’ve added an RSS feed to the sidebar of this blog to keep you up to date with my progress.

What are your goals beyond 2010?

My MacBook is home and all fixed.  My couple of days being laptopless have been interesting.  Here’s what I learned:

Old windows laptops suck

I have a very old (8 years) laptop with a massive 500mb RAM and 20GB hard drive which lives under the bed.  It would have been as well staying under the bed!  By the time it had installed its 47 updates and then decided Service Pack 3 was in order I’d wasted a day.  Don’t bother.  A pen and paper work better!

iPhones are great… except…

iPhone

My new iPhone appeared the day after I spilled coffee on my MacBook.  Just as well. The email works great with exchange so all my work email and calender was all there when I needed it and appeared like magic when I started up my laptop.

But there is stuff missing that I had on my Palm m130 years ago that you just expect to be there on what reports to be a ‘business tool’.  

I want to be able to access documents from my server or laptop and edit them.  How hard can that be?  I can get my email from my server, why not my word docs?  I know dataviz is working on documents to go for the iphone but seriously, is there no Word app out there?  I’m sure Micro$soft know there are big buck for the winner of the iPhone mobile office race.  What’s taking so long!!!

What about presentations?  It’s great I can use my phone as a remote… but my Nokia N95 runs powerpoint with a video cable out to a projector.

Come on Apple.  The iPhone is brilliant.  The interface is amazing, the email and web apps for twitter and facebook are all good.  The games are smart and quirky.  But I want business tools too!

It seems as though Nokia’s Sports Tracker is just a neat little training tool for runners and cyclists… however…

Do you ever go on holiday, wander around, take some photos and then forget where you went and how you got there? This could be the tool for you! Sports Tracker records your journey using GPS (kind of the opposite of sat nav… tells you where you have been rather than where you are going!) and you can then upload your journey to the Sports Tracker site where it marries your GPS data with Google Maps. You can add photos of your route using geotags. So Sports Tracker is really a Journey Tracker. Pretty cool.

Got a Nokia phone with GPS?  Go walking, running, cycling… and want to know how far and how fast you have gone?  Nokia have a very nice beta of Sports Tracker, a training management site like Nike + which uses the GPS capability of phones like the N95 and marries it up with a training scheduler, maps and timing to let you create running routes and keep data on your training.  All you need is an arm wallet to carry your phone in and you’re set.

If you want to you can share routes, post your training information to your blog and add media like photos to your routes. Nice.

RefWorks is genius. It helps you collate all those searches in databases for journal articles and papers and puts them into a bibliography that you can download!!! Why have I just found out about this!!!

I haven’t posted my bag for a while. I’ve got several new things since the last time…

New bag, new laptop, new notebooks, new phone BUT I’ve lost my favourite pen!!!

I had a Parker Urban and I lost it, then found it again last week and now I’ve lost it again! Anyway, I’m sure it will turn up (probably on my desk when I move something).

UPDATE: Found it!!!  It was in my suit pocket… no wonder I couldn’t find it!

So, what’s in your bag?

I just had a great coffee (he had tea) and chat with Thomas aka headphonaught.  I’ve been reading Thomas’ blog for a while and we almost hooked up for coffee awhile back but it never quite happened.

Well, today was the day.  He’s got some great ideas and it was good to chat with someone who’s looking beyond the here and now.  I think there is much mileage in what we talked about and hope it can become a reality.  Watch this space.

Oh, and I smacked my head off a concrete beam.  It hurt.  A lot.  And it bled.  A bit.

In other news… I got a new bag.  My messenger bag is hurting my shoulder.

I’ve got a notebook for work.  It’s an A5 hardback plain paper book (from W H Smith as it happens… Moleskine next time) and I have set it out with tabs.  It was/is a key part of my plan to Get Things Done.  It works for work.  I write stuff I have to do from meetings in it, draw little boxes next to ‘to do’ items and tick them off when I do them.  All good.

I also have sections for ‘Someday’, ‘Blog’, ‘Projects’ and ‘Training’.  I don’t seem to write much in these.  I’ve written 2 things in the ‘blog’ bit, 1 page of stunning ideas in the ‘training’ bit and nothing in the ’someday’ section.

Is this normal?  Should I have dreams and visions that I record in my nice notebook?  Just wondering…

I’m still being pretty organised.  For those of you who missed the ‘clearing out and starting over’ kind of posts a few weeks ago, I’m having a go at being tidy and organised.

So far it’s not too bad, although I have a small pile of things that need either sticking back in my bag or in a file but that’s a job for work time.

The one thing I have added to my arsenal of tools is ‘Micro$oft OneNote’.  I’m liking it for some of my projects as it lets me collate different types of files and info on one page.  Handy for planning classes, training and stuff like that but also for bringing together large amounts of web stuff and PDFs gathered while researching.  Worth a look if you haven’t seen it and you can download it as a free trial.

I still haven’t quite got to grips with my paper notebook.  I’m a little scared to write in it I think!  I’ve divided it into sections and put tabs in and it looks great but I’m on page 2!  Maybe that’s the trick, only writing down what you really need to!

As you may be aware I’m trying very hard to be ‘organised’ and ‘productive’.  Today I encountered my first snag.  It seems that just when you think you are sailing along on the river of Getting Things Done your Nokia N73 ’smart’ phone decides that it doesn’t want to talk to your laptop anymore.

I spent HOURS reinstalling the software, removing and updating drivers and even rolling back to an earlier restore point.  I gave up, went for dinner and when I came back I plugged my phone in and it synchronised.  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

So, tomorrow I have a longer Task List because today was interrupted my technology.  I’m using paper!!!