Farewell to My One-ton Brick

December/January is always a time to review our goals and objectives, compare them to our life mission, and refocus on what matters most. At the same time, it is an opportunity to look at our toolbox to see if the productivity tools we use are still the best.

Well, after a careful review of my productivity toolbox, I made the decision this year to do away with my faithful FranklinCovey paper planner. Not that I hate paper, but when I started to compare the overall bulk of my binder with the other pieces in my briefcase, I quickly realized that my beloved binder took up more room and weighed more than the rest of my tools.

In the end, here’s what caused me to shelf my binder:

1. Weight. My binder with all of the various components weighed more than my laptop.
2. Size. My binder with its two-inch rings takes up as much room in my bag as two laptops.
3. Effectiveness. This is the big one. In the last two years I have centralized all of my productivity management in Outlook. I use Outlook 2007 in combination with FranklinCovey’s Plan Plus for Outlook (v. 5). PPO, combined with my Windows Mobile enabled phone (Verizon VX6700), has proven to be an excellent system for me. When I looked at my planner pages from 2007, I could see that the bulk of my daily, weekly, and monthly planning was done in PPO and printed for my binder. As much as I hated to admit it, I simply wasn’t using my FC paper system anymore.

So, with much regret, I took my beloved binder and placed it on the shelf. (Why all the affection for a binder? It has been my faithful companion for 15 years. I started with Franklin Quest back in the early early 1990s. I briefly tried the Seven Habits planner when Covey released The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but quickly transitioned back to Franklin Quest. Ultimately, of course, the two merged and I had the best of both.)