Garrett M. Vonk

I’m going to use this opportunity to promote a tool I’ve been using for the last few months that has really helped organize my day-to-day life.

My Lifestyle at the Moment
I don’t lead a particularly hectic life. I don’t own a business or make high-profile decisions, and my days aren’t filled with meetings and phone calls. I go to work, configure software and code, attend a few status meetings here and there, and go home. I have no doubt that I will have the opportunity to have more going on in my professional life in the future, but for now, this is it.

As a result, I have no need to carry a laptop or PDA. I keep my work schedule in Lotus Notes on my work PC, but this is generally limited to current tasks, sporadic meetings, and reminders to fill out my time card. Nothing earthshattering, and certainly nothing to necessitate getting a crackberry or syncing my life to a smart phone of some kind.

As a result, since my social engagements are not overwhelming, and my travel is limited to a few trips a year, I can easily remember most of my schedule in my head. It would, in fact, be a waste of resources for me to carry a device around 24/7, just to remind myself that I’m going to trivia on Wednesday, and driving to Florida for Christmas. I can remember those things on my own.

The Problem
What to do, then, when there’s something I desperately do need to keep up with? (…up with which I need to keep?) I don’t have a laptop or PDA on me, and my washing machine practically dares me to go to a pen- and paper-based system of organization. Keeping notes and important appointments on a PC is a problem of dichotomy: I’m equally likely to be at home as I am to be at work when I need to access some piece of information, be it a flight schedule, a to-do list, or any of the random bits of data we all rely on.

Webmail has solved the work/home email problem, and Gmail picked up the trail blazed by Hotmail (mostly “blazed” pre-Microsoft/Passport/MSN) and improved upon it in all directions. I can send/receive my garrettvonk.com email, through the Gmail interface, at work, at home, or anywhere. And Gmail was my first solution to this “random pieces of data” problem. Much of the data we need to access lives in email messages anyway. Flight itineraries, purchase confirmations and shipping tracking, and invitations to parties all come straight to my email anyway, and with the advent of Gmail, the whole portion of our life that exists in email is now searchable.

But what if I have an idea or conversation outside of the email universe? In the past, I’d create a new email in Gmail and save it as a draft. My drafts would serve as temporary scratchpads, easy to create and find but not organized in any meaningful way. I soon had 25+ email drafts that sorely needed organization and weeding.

Backpack It
I found Backpack in June and started the free trial. I think it took me about 20 minutes to hit the 5-page limit and upgrade my account. I’ll bet a lot of people get converted to paying customers that way. Here are just a few Backpack pages I’ve used lately:

• hhgregg Purchase - I had to gather all of my TV research in one place when I decided to upgrade to a new TV. I try to pore over as much data as possible when I’m making a big purchase, so having a page to add all my bits of information to was invaluable.
• Christmas Shopping Lists - Lists of the gift ideas we’ve had for our friends and relatives, a place to keep track of what we’ve actually bought and the best prices, and notes discussing what people would like to receive.
• Web Logins - Since Backpack keeps all your pages private by default (unless you specify otherwise), I keep all of my logins/passwords in one place here so that I can access them from anywhere.
• Camping Planning - I made this page public so our group that goes camping could plan our trips together. Easy checklists, inline images for maps, etc.
• Our New Home - We gathered information here about our new condo, so that our family and friends could see what we were talking about. (We got a lot of “Atlantic Station… What’s that?!?”)

I obviously could have created pages like this in html for free, but I never would have actually taken the time to do so. Backpack lets you create pages like this on a whim, and that’s the part that makes it a killer app. Let’s say Heather and I are throwing a party and we need to brainstorm dishes, decor, liquor brands, and so on. In about 15 seconds, I can create a new page, start some checklists, and share it with Heather’s account privately. She then gets an email saying “new page shared with you” and goes to her Backpack, suggests a great chicken quesadilla recipe, and lo and behold, we’re collaborating!

Like Gmail, Backpack uses AJAX to keep the application very nimble. You can organize your random bits of information into meaningful pages, and just the process of dividing your clutter up into logical units helps immensely. You can set up reminders to go to your email or send your phone an SMS at a pre-set time (I generally use these to remind me “Get the dry cleaning” or “Time for an oil change”).

Anyway, I definitely suggest you at least sign up for a free account to test it out. If you’re on a work computer all day and need to keep track of your life, it sure beats scraps of paper!