Forget about “where do you want to go today?” Most of us have to work for a living. The more meaningful question for me is “where am I supposed to be today… right now?!” We’ve come a long way from carrying crumbled notes in our pockets. I used to be wonderful at taking notes that I either couldn’t read or couldn’t remember what they were related to. Palm Pilots and other PDAs have helped solve the nuisance of lost notes, but even the Palm (it’s always in my pocket) isn’t a truly industrial strength organizer… it’s the best when you’re on the go, but I still haven’t seen anyone in their office with a Palm keyboard (don’t laugh, you can get one) typing correspondence or printing activity calendars.

I found the need for a contact manager long before the first Palm Pilot. Ten years ago, there wasn’t much in the way of choice. When in doubt, chose the market leader, right. Right? So my first experience in trying to tame chaos was with the now forgotten Polaris Pack Rat 3.0. What an eye-opener… this early windows program could do almost anything (or so it seemed at the time). It was configurable in a number of unique ways to allow you to associate lots of different things with contacts and to change the screen display any way you felt like it. Its only problem… it crashed a lot and you lost data when it crashed; not very acceptable over time. Finally the company was victim of the “tar baby upgrade” syndrome-the one that wouldn’t work right no matter what-and they went out of business around 1992.

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