This is mainly due to my current work-related business, which I hope to reduce at least a little in the autumn; I’ve learnt huge amounts in this job, but none of it has been cerebral in the way that my degree was. That’s a good thing – but I want to get back to academic thinking, with a bit of an urge to go in the philosophy direction. My job’s focus on practical skills has left most of my mind not-quite-caring for long enough to write stuff down if the topic isn’t in the here and now.

Anyway, I’ve got this far already: what I was thinking about this morning was “aims” – for Life, I mean. Goals, objectives, targets, dreams… that stuff. I don’t really know what mine is, yet, which is fine – my middle-term plan is to take enough variety of jobs/activities that I can narrow it down.

It occurred to me, though, that there aren’t really all that many aims to pick from. We (can) all have short-, middle- and long-term aims: but as far as I can tell, these define each other in latter-to-former order. I suspect that everyone has more trouble defining their long-term aim(s), but actually, you can get an idea of the shape of them from the nature of the middle-term aims. Likewise, the (usually well-defined) short-term aims help to define the middle-term aims.

So, what if each of us, psychologically, is basically acting on a single meta-long-term aim all the time? The nature and style of all sub-aims alludes to that one meta-aim. In which case, what possible meta-aims are there? After much pondering, I think there might just be two: personal happiness (in a ‘nirvana’ sense of the word), and group happiness.

An aside: “group” would have to be defined as “all the other entities in one’s sphere of conciousness that the individual perceives as having an ability to affect the state of, to some extent, directly or indirectly”. So for most of us, “group” would just be immediate family and friends, coworkers, etc – people who we have contact with. Some people realise that they actually are able to affect entities that are more socially-distant – be it a local charity or organisation, a nearby community facing some problem due to obfuscating politicians, “the environment” locally or generally, or “the starving masses in Africa”. The ones who realise that they can affect these latter categories are the ones who go to rallies, demonstrations, join Amnesty, join Greenpeace, or organise huge rock gigs to raise money…

Back to the main argument. I postulate two primary meta-aims: achieving personal happiness; and achieving group happiness. Is this really a surprising conclusion? Probably not, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. I can imagine somebody arguing that “getting rich” would be a meta-aim, but it’s really not: money is (or can be) a means to happiness, either of oneself, of ones’ group, or of both.

Another aside: it occurred about here that we as a developed society have a huge problem distinguishing money as “a common unit of worth for ensuring equal exchange of goods and services” from money as “a bringer of good things”. It is, in fact, only the former: your desires and decisions are what bring the good things. I might expand on this another day.

Of course, defining either as “complete” is tricky: but perhaps they’re more of a path to be travelled, rather than a destination. Continual, gradual increase in happiness for as much of one’s lifetime as possible. Everyone wants to die happy, right? But do they do that because they ended up sitting on a great pile of money and possessions, having had many huge meals, wild experiences, and memorable encounters; or do they do it because they know that, thanks to them, fewer kids are dying on a far-away continent?

It should definitely be noted that raising the happiness of oneself is also an effort towards raising group happiness, provided it doesn’t actively detract from other people’s personal happiness in the process (e.g. theft). Earning money in order to gain experiences, meet new people, and fix happy memories is fine: other people are probably going to come off better too, or at least not worse. Earning money by theft, of course, would be a different matter. But “group-happy” people will, and should, do things for themselves too – not to do so would in most cases make them less motivated. The difference is just that they see the point in helping others, as well as themselves, whereas a “self-happy” person wouldn’t do, necessarily.

I should also make clear that “self-happy” people are not necessarily bad, evil criminal people. I think there are plenty of perfectly well-balanced people who come into the “self-happy” category, but still go about being useful members of society because it helps them achieve their goal in a simple, honest way. Our legal system would appear, mostly, to tend towards encouraging “group-happy” mentality, but I think that’s probably a bad thing. This distinction of primary aims is a different kettle of fish from morality: and pushing naturally “self-happy” people into a “group-happy” box is just going to cause trouble. On the other hand, having a double-standard legal system that treats the two types of person differently, would be rather silly as well. I don’t know what the resolution to this problem is!

An easily noticed change is the dramatic reduction in the number of possible contexts for my actions.  As a student, I usefully distinguished in my to-do list between actions “on my PC”, “on the internet anywhere”, “in my room, but not at the PC”, “in college”, “in my department”, “in the town centre”, “at the ADC”, “in Devon”… a rather long list.  This helped me prioritise based on where I was, and make efficient trips away from where I was currently to do a number of things at once, rather than, e.g. having to go to the town centre and back more than once in a day.  It also meant I could avoid leaving my PC on for extended periods – I could go through the list of “at PC” and “at internet” things, switch it off, and then look at things to do at home that didn’t require a PC (like reading for essays…).

Now, although I could potentially still make a lot of these distinctions, I find I don’t need to.  Since I’ve spent the summer being poor, my primary collection bucket is a simple hPDA, with lots of yellow cards for collection of “stuff”, a pink card for listing of non-work projects, and two blue cards: one for all non-work actions, and one for any work-actions that I need to process when I’m next at work.  Stuff comes in to the yellow cards, and then I occasionally sit down, identify the actions, and move them to the relevant blue card or do them right away.  When I’m next at work, the work-actions get copied into Outlook, and crossed off immediately.  The non-work actions are never so numerable that subdividing them is worthwhile – two sides of A6 can easily be scanned for things I can do right now.

The really major difference between student and adult life is that of work/home divide.  As a student, it simply doesn’t exist: my bedroom was my study and primary workplace, and all possible actions (things to be done) could be easily lumped under the single meta-category of “life”, whether they were university, social-life, or something else.  Now, I have a clear distinction: when I’m at work, I want to think only about work-related actions, and when I’m not, I don’t.  This isn’t easy, especially since my job demands long hours of me.  I do unavoidably think of personal things whilst at work, which need to be recorded appropriately so I can deal with them in my free time; I also do think of work-related ideas/projects/actions in my free time, and need to be able to record and postpone these until I go back to work.  The hPDA allows me to do this but because I’m transferring work things to Outlook, I find I don’t really, truly trust my system – a necessity in the GTD paradigm. It means I sometimes re-think up a work action in the middle of the night, that I later discover was already in Outlook – but since I’ve then lost sleep over it, this is a blatent Fail.

Returning to using a digital PDA would solve the problem, as I could easily track work and non-work actions in one place (syncing it to Outlook if I wished) and view only the ones appropriate to where I am.  But I don’t want to do that! I’m currently holding out for the release of the Google Android, so I can compare to the iPhone and buy one or other of those.  Then I’ll probably move to a web-based action-tracking system, which I’ll be able to access from my office PC or from the phone, whichever is more convenient.  This example of GTD gone wrong is a pretty clear proof of why David Allen insists that you need to have one single trusted system for all your actions, and be able to get at it at any time.  

The third real difference between student and adult life is simply one of available time: after day-to-day existence, the time I have left for persuing non-work projects is pretty slim.  As a student I had enough time for non-academic projects that I wasn’t forced to refine my action-picking system too much – a few wasted seconds didn’t matter.  Now, I really try to squeeze things in in the 5-minute gaps in life – so being able to track every last thing and effectively pick the best to do right now is so much more important.  I think changing to a web-based to-do list, with the ability to check it anywhere, will probably make this better, but for now I’m just limping along with the hPDA and a slightly less-than-total coverage of open loops in my personal life.

All data points are imperfect copies of a Platonic Data Point, an underlying Grand Truth. All data points, provided the experiment that collected them is well-designed, fit into “The grand scheme of things”. It is Not Done in Science to look solely at results that fit with what you’ve recently discovered, and ignore the ones that don’t. You have to take them all together, because they’re all equally approximations to the Truth.

However, based on my interactions with a “real” science department last summer and over the course of this academic year, the way Science (or at least, Experimental Psychology, but I suspect it generalises to some extent) is done is more like this:

All data points collected by me, and my colleagues in this department, are imperfect copies of a Departmental-Aims Data Point, which proves what this department is currently trying to show. All data points collected by Them, and Their Colleagues in Their department, are imperfect copies of a Their-Departmental-Aims Data Point, which proves what Their department is trying to show, which is mutually exclusive to what this department wants to show.

Now, this is not to say that Science is totally failing here: all the scientists referred to above would still, if shown a set of results that prove their theory wrong whilst strongly corroborating the theory of the competing department, back down and accept that they are probably/definitely wrong. So Science still moves forwards as it should. However, in the meantime and while all results are just-a-little-hazy (as tends to be the case) the literature implicitly makes this marked distinction between the stuff from department A and the stuff from department B. Which jars a little with the supposed nature of Science.

This is something that philosophers of science are aware of, I know: my module last year on the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge covered similar ground, as well as other dichotomies along the same general lines. Still, it’s something that can’t hurt to mull over a bit more.

Hmmm…

In terms of my more general organisation, I still use a variety of “buckets” (Allen’s term) to collect stuff prior to putting it into my PDA. The PDA is generally handy, but I still make use of paper notes in very-obvious places, especially at night, and I have a handful of computer docs and of course emails that have stuff in. I’m in the process of refining the system so that everything actionable gets into the PDA, EXCEPT someday/maybe ideas (in GTD, any project that you’d like to do but can’t commit to right away gets put into this category). I put them in as a PDA memo when I think of them, but keep them as text document lists on my PC longer-term. When I review (theoretically weekly) I can move things back into the active projects list if appropriate.

Reference material is stored mostly as documents in a ‘ref’ hierarchy on my PC – some stuff is obviously in Gmail but I generally “print” a PDF of it (using CutePDF) and save it locally. Out-and-about reference gets jotted in the PDA and transferred when I can. I also have a two-tray desk tidy that I use one tray of for reference paperwork – there’s never that much for me at the moment – and the other tray is a bucket for bits of paper, receipts, and so on. A lot of it finds its way into the bin eventually: for stuff I do need to keep (payslips, for example) I’ve bought one of these which is like a mini filing cabinet! (Additionally, much cheaper – I have no need for anything like the quantity of dead-tree reference storage that a proper metal cabinet merits.) Stuff that is specifically reference for one project goes into a separate ‘projects’ hierarchy, in a subfolder with the same or similar name to the project.

Something that I haven’t seen covered in GTD yet (I’m only on chapter 2!) is long-term archival of “stuff I’d like to keep for nostalgic reasons but will never need to look at again”. Mostly the digital sort, for me, though at home I have plenty of the paper sort. For now I have an ‘archive’ hierarchy on the PC, but within that, everything is a bit higgledy-piggledy. I want some means of storing it all, such that I can easily make incremental, not-too-frequent backups to optical media – which suggests in folders by year. I have things that span multiple years, though (e.g. documents from my GCSEs and A-Levels, and even Keystage 3) as well as things that really feel better organised topically, like sound effects from various ADC shows I sound-designed for, and photos from family holidays.

(Yes, I’ve completely stopped having a “My Pictures” folder like Windows wants you to. Picture folders from specific trips that fit the description “only for nostalgia, I’ll never *need* to look at these” go under “archive”, whilst random images that might be needed go, unsorted, under “ref”. Images that relate directly to a project (either a current or someday one) go inside that project’s folder.)

There are a few minor problems I’ve encountered in implementing GTD as a student. First, Allen’s “two-minute rule” (If you can do something in two minutes or less, just do it, right now) doesn’t really work for me. Sometimes I’m working on, e.g., an essay, and I need to totally concentrate, so if another action comes in, I have to add it to the PDA system no matter what. At other times, I’m not particularly doing anything, just generally absorbing information or mulling something over, and I can easily drop it to just-do a 10-minute or even 30-minute long task, without entering it into the system. I’m not sure if this element will go away when I stop being a student – I suspect not – so I need to work out whether I really should be doing it differently, or what.

Related to this is the fact that, as a student, I have some very long-duration actionable items, by GTD standards. If I’m set an essay to do, it’s a project: but eventually there will be a single action item which is “sit down and write the damn thing”, and that can take a while if it’s a tricky topic and not meant to be under exam conditions. An even better example is revision: that’s a project, but the individual actions are all things that have to happen again and again, over the course of a few weeks, with the only end-point being “having actually sat the exam”. GTD, being more intended for office/corporate executives, doesn’t seem to really explain how to deal with such things. It tends to cause me (if I don’t actively monitor myself for it) to ignore these really long, hard-to-tick-off actions in favour of doing a lot of shorter but less crucial actions. I haven’t found an answer, either: I’m just getting on with the revision as best I can. Perhaps there’s an answer somewhere in the rest of the book!

(Other reasons, not so related to this essay but still pertinent: things get taught twice, which can sometimes be useful, but often not; you get told two conflicting versions of one “fact”; most teachers find themselves teaching something they’re not actually that good at; it discourages synthesis of different courses, e.g. chemistry and biology.)

Right, so here’s the bulk of the argument. All curricula are essentially composed of two things: facts and skills. There’s certainly a grey area there, but in essence, for any subject right up to A-Level, you’re gonna have to have a body of factual knowledge memorized, and a set of skills which you apply to that body of knowledge. In Physics, the facts might be equations, physical constants, and models, e.g. Newtonian dynamics; the skills would be mathematical manipulation of the numbers/equations, and interpreting exam problems in the context of the model. In History, the facts would be more traditional dates, names, and places, and the skills would be things like being able to induct that event X in 1492 might have partially caused event Y in 1501, given historical sources A, B and C.

In traditional education systems, like the standard state-school National Curriculum, you have to master both the facts and the skills; the lumping of sets of these into “Subjects” is mainly based on what is shared between the facts. The skills often overlap from subject to subject, naturally (both Physics and History require some grasp of deductive and inductive logic), hence the phrase “transferable skills”.

HOWEVER, we now have the Internet. The Internet is, if nothing else, a huge fact-repository. Yes, there are issues over reliability and so on: but there is so much of the Internet that you can in most cases cross-check your sources online. So although it’s still worth children getting to grips with the facts, it really isn’t necessary, most of the time, to make them learn them all – and indeed, gradually, the education system is taking note of this fact and shifting away from that requirement. Exams are one thing, but in real life, pretty much everyone just uses the net, or a library if they have big hang-ups about Wikipedia.

That leaves skills as the most important part of the education system. It’s actually been this way for some time, but only really clearly so since the Web came of age sometime in the mid-to-late 90s. Some subjects have a huge bias towards facts, with all the skills involved being equally learnable in some other classroom environment. Those subjects have a problem: they’re redundant! The skills will be picked up elsewhere, and the facts can be gained relatively easily if the child becomes interested in that area.

The best example, as far as I see it, is Geography. The items on a Geography curriculum have one thing in common: the facts are all Earth-related. The skills involved are very varied, and in my mental cubbyhole system, I need a whole Ikea outlet to get enough shelving units to put all the skills in. I’m not for a minute suggesting that the skills, or the facts, are unimportant: just that, once the importance of the facts is negated (let’s face it, Wikipedia does tend to do very well on Geo-facts up to the kind of level I had to learn pre-GCSE), there’s no real reason to teach it in one lesson. Most of the skills would slot much better into a PSHE or General Studies-type lesson. It’s things you really do need to know to get by in life (how to read a map, why volcanoes are dangerous, what the weatherman is on about, why to be tolerant of other cultures…) but that don’t have much connection to each other. If you’re actually interested in such things, then sure, you should be able to opt for relevant classes at some point (GCSE level, probably), but that should really just be tying together skills that you already know, and adding factual detail.

The Government really hasn’t considered this yet as far as I can see. It would mean a pretty big shift in education, I think, and some swapping around between KS1-2 and 3-4 curricula. I’m all in favour of this, as I’ve been saying for a long time that primary-school education should include a lot more skills that kids learn best at a young age (language, drawing, musical proficiency, cultural differences and equality, in addition to basic mathematics and reading/writing skills) and should avoid things that could be covered much quicker if started later – such as science, analytic skills, etc.

In summary, the internet has rendered mass-learning of facts obsolete and made skill-development the focus of education. To respond, education should be ordered around the skills, rather than the facts, with optional courses at a later stage to tie skills together with facts required for certain career-areas. In addition, earlier teaching of the skills would often require less time, freeing up time later in the curriculum for a broader education.

Although I’m certainly of the opinion that the system in place until this date (bi-annual Ball, on the alternate years to Magdalene and the same day) is preferable to the system College seems to want (tri-annual, which will clash with Magdalene every six years, and create a massive discontinuity in the flow of advice from Committee to Committee), I do think we need to give the Ball up as gone this year – and indeed, in the last day, that seems to be the case. At the JCR Open Meeting on Thursday, the overwhelming opinion was that we’d prefer no Ball to a Ball with attendence limited by degree classification; and we have since had an early-ticket offer from another College, which will, I believe, lead all but die-hard protestees away from the cause – after all, when it comes down to it, all Balls are pretty much like one another, on the grand scheme of things, and once dress code and price are put aside.

Instead, what us as an undergraduate body should really be considering is how to make sure we can, erm, pick the ball back up (sorry, that pun is far too subtle) having dropped it. The fact is that the next Ball is, with 99% certainty, going to be in 2009, so the current Committee should, in my opinion, be spending the time they would otherwise spend on organising, in making sure there are clear written guides to aid the next Committee, who won’t be necessarily able to benefit from the previous experience directly. Without repeating the many things that were said at the Open Meeting, I do think it is stupid in the extreme to retaliate against College in any way that harms the College’s reputation and future recruiting ability. College is doing a pretty good job of harming it already, by demonstrating that they don’t want to listen to us. We should be trying to help get the Collegiate academic status back on track, so that in future years, students will be able to put forward a strong(er) case for a bi-annual Ball not affecting our Tompkins position. Sure, College has a long list of other reasons why they are going tri-annual, and are not going to be swayed on their validity or lack thereof; but I suspect if we were back in the top half of the Tompkins Table, the rest of the items might seem somewhat less of a problem.

I’d also like to publicly note that I still don’t think the JCR Committee acted incorrectly in deciding not to act on the issue of the May Ball until we, the student body, had made our views clear. They are a representative Committee and for them to act on their own feelings about the postponement/cancellation would have been irresponsible: much as they could guess what our response would be, I’d have been more angry if they acted without checking. It is however the case, I feel, that the JCR should not be allowing itself to exist as a screen for the College authorities (in particular the Bursar) to hide behind when making announcements. They should be emailing us directly, and as such, claiming direct responsibility for the decisions they make. The counterargument to that is that, as our representative body, the JCR should be used as a go-between in the other direction – that’s what they’re there for. If these two different directions of communication were more clearly demarcated, perhaps the undergraduate body would have been quicker to contact the JCR formally explaining that they had a view on the May Ball that they wished to be passed on to the College. And then the JCR would have known where we stand, and started acting as such, sooner.

This post was originally going to go in somewhat of a different, albeit still student-political, direction; it hasn’t, so I shall round it off there. As ever, I’m just-a-little apathetic about such issues in a Daoist way, and inclinded to say “Que sera, sera”. In the end, there are more important issues than May Balls in the world, and as mature undergraduates, we should all be able to keep that perspective, know when we’ve been beaten, and get back to real life. Will this decision of College adversely affect our life at any point post-graduation? I doubt it, other than possibly causing a few people to be more demotivated in Exam Term and get a few less points in Tripos. Will it seem significant in 10 years’ time? No, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. What might be significant is the ways in which our actions now are interpreted, for good or bad, by those outside the Cambridge Bubble, and our how our choices affect the JCR’s standing in College for future undergrads; most of all, what we can learn from this – about tactics, politics, debate, how to lead a meeting well, whatever – that are, in fact, as crucial life skills as anything we’re learning in lectures.

The producer is the processor and micellaneous on-board devices, executing vast numbers of low-level instructions for higher-level purposes, communicating with all the other hardware components as and when necessary, and reminding everything of the time. The LD, SD, and other design roles are the PCI/AGP cards; they manage the output from the system as a whole, that the user (the audience) experiences. The TD is the dedicated graphics processor on the video card, while the LD is the rest of the video card. You generally need a LAN card, a publicist, as well, to communicate outsde the hardware box.

Because this computer powers up and down quite regularly, you need a hard drive for long-term storage. The Stage Manager records anything and everything, ready to provde the data again when called upon by another piece of hardware. The DSM is the device drivers; they talk directly to the PCI cards whilst power is on, telling them when to do things, and what things to do.

You then have to add a director, or an operating system, that uses the drivers and talks to all these bits of hardware and gives them meaningful higher-level tasks to do, as well as making sure the user/audience doesn’t see too much of what the hardware is doing. They provide a fundamental layer of abstraction so that the cast, the applications that the user actually interacts with, can get on with what they’re doing without worrying about the particular hardware implemented.

Most directors are OS X, of course (concerned with eye candy and making sure the user has a good experience) but you do get many flavours of Linux, just like real life: the hardware is usually a lot more discernable to the user in these cases, and sometimes your graphics or sound cards may not work quite right, from the user’s point of view. You do get Windows 2k/XP directors occasionally (crash from time to time, but when they work, boy are they powerful! Also tend to collaborate well, and have lots of contacts) and even Win 98se (highly traditional, unambitious), but the rest of the 9x tree are extinct, because no users want to buy that kind of thing any more.

Home is where your “shell” wants to take you when you’re not being passed any arguments.

Hmmm… I can’t decide whether this is actually deep, or just ridiculously geeky. Both would be nice.

• Slept, ate, and washed
• Failed to go to a Pirate Party on account of needing yet more sleep, and generally not feeling great
• Went to Dorset for lunch, came back again (up to here is the weekend)
• Went to Wales for a week, leaving all my Cambridge luggage strewn about my room and having frantically repacked enough for the week
• Came back, slept, ate and washed
• Failed to go to Cornwall for the weekend on account of being tired still, and the event having suffered from slightly less-than-complete organisation
• Spent the weekend clearing up, tidying, sorting out a term and a summer holiday’s worth of paper and junk, making PC work, syncing work and settings from laptop back to PC, solving organisation problems

On the last point: I can’t remember if I’ve previously mentioned here that my trusty Sony Clie PDA had a slight accident at the beginning of the summer, and has now gone to the great eBay in the sky. I finally cleared up the Palm Desktop software today, and have started to take the gadget apart as a token “burial”. (Well, some bits might be useful…)

Since losing the PDA, I’ve based my organisation around a cheap Sainsbury’s pocket-size notebook, which has worked fine through my reasonably-relaxed summer. But I don’t think it’s going to cut it for Uni life, somehow. I started reading up on Getting Things Done at some point this summer, which has snowballed into an attempt to, somehow, really get my work life into some semblance of a system. I’m not pushing GTD explicitly; I just want to find something that works for me. Lots of surfing later, I’ve found a whole host of websites on time management, “life hacks” (real world tricks that save time etc) and so forth – see my del.icio.us account for details. I have various firefox extensions to this end, such as Better Gmail, GTGInbox, and Zotero, all of which seem to be useful.

I use Google Apps’ mail service exclusively for email now. The system I have in place is quite complicated, and involves having my Cantab address (you don’t have to wait to graduate to get one!) gradually take over as the address for mailing lists, automated email from websites etc, signing in to things etc – because that is the only address that, as far as I can see, won’t ever die. So doing this now will save me having to ever go to eBay, Amazon, eBuyer, etc etc, to change my email address. Cantab currently forwards to Hermes, and everything arriving to Hermes (still lots of stuff that doesn’t come from Cantab, of course) is forwarded by Sieve to stuart at sjcuthbertson dot me dot uk. This is a Google Apps account address, so I basically see Gmail, just with a different domain in the top-right corner.

Certain mailing lists that I want to archive get forwarded from here to yet another gmail address (not an apps one, as then it’s not dependent on my paying for the domain for ever), to stay for evermore. That way, if my main Apps email ever starts to get full, I can delete back copies of the mailing lists. Hermes still pops incoming mail into various IMAP folders on arrival – that way if I do ever need to quickly pop into Hermes webmail for arcane reasons, it will be fairly manageable. But I’m thinking of telling it to drop all the mailing list bulk as (in one case at least) It’s Just So Damn Busy Sometimes. It’ll still go through to Apps first.

I’ve also now uploaded all my IMAP folders to Gmail and labelized them, thanks to Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader. It does a neat job of bulk-forwarding an mbox file to Gmail, while maintaining the original headers. This brings me to a grand total of 6% of my space allowance

My challenge now is to get to grips with using Gmail for GTD principles, and working out an effective GTD-esque strategy for my life. I really do need some kind of gadget that can go beep 10 minutes before every appointment I have, so I’m considering buying a middle-of-the-range smartphone with usb-sync and -charge, a calendar view on the desktop, and the ability to add calendar events nicely, similar to how Palm does it. My current phone, a Nokia 3100, can do alarms at a given time but doesn’t really do calendaring. I also need my phone to sync to/from Google Calendars somehow, which I can then use in conjunction with the phone while I’m near my PC. I will probably also combine this with a GTD notebook for speedy adding to inbox, which I later process to Gmail, and also for notes and things which would be tedious to enter in the phone.

The alternative is another cheap Palm PDA, which I’d be more familiar with, but which would mean I’m back to two clunky pocket gadgets. I don’t really want to do that. My problem is in separating “hard” calendar events from todos and reminders – I can put hard calendar events into a smartphone but if all my todos are just on Gmail, then I need to be able to see a computer to know what to do next, and I won’t always. I considered a Blackberry, from which I could always see Gmail, but the costs are prohibitive for a light phone user like me (