In the end I picked the Nexus One for a couple of reasons.

1. Better hardware specifications and the most recent version of Android
2. Doesn’t force me to have Motorola Blur on my phone (which, for me, is really bloatware; I don’t twitter or have time to spend on facebook, and integrating it into my  phone is just going to make that worse all while eating the battery life…)
3. Laziness;  T-mobile had been fine so far, and they make switching phones as easy a switching your sim card, whereas changing carriers sounded like work for a phone that wasn’t as good.
4. There are freeware apps to do almost all of what Blur does, for far less overhead.

I LOVE it.  Screen is gorgeous, easy integration with google voice and my gmail, a number of fun games to keep me busy while standing in line, a number of great apps from the android store that let me do all sorts of things on it, such as quickly read all my rss feeds, make a GPS unnecessary via maps, scan and comparison shop barcodes, browse the web, check news and weather, find a local restaurant and see it’s reviews, etc.

There remain a couple of issues that I hope to find solutions for in the near future:

1. Exchange email: On the blackberry I knew immediately if my boss pinged me for something.  The native mail client doesn’t really provide the same kind of notification/home screen visibility.  I’ve been testing a 3rd party tool (Touchdown) which would cost a bit ($9.99) but integrates well with exchange, but then I have two separate inboxes.  What I WANT to use is K-9 mail, which provides for a single integrated inbox, but which can’t seem to talk to my work exchange server.  Still working on this one.
2. Task management: I currently have a bunch of things running to deal with that, with varying success.  Remember the Milk has an app that isn’t bad.  There is another task manager called Astrid that will sync with Remember the Milk that is amazing, but not necessarily as timely as I might like.  And GTDAgenda, which I reviewed previously, has their first version of an android app out.  It needs some improvements (which I’ve sent to the developer) before it will work for me, but if he makes some of those changes I may well make GTDAgenda my one and only task manager.  An Android app resolves several of the concerns I had before by providing easy remote access.  (Full disclosure:  Use of the android app requires a paid account, which starts at $39.45/year.)
3. The perfect home screen:  I’ve tested two apps meant to help with this organization; Executive Assistant and SlideScreen.  Executive Assistant will be pretty close when they add task management (which I’m told they are working on), but there is still an issue with the dual mail boxes right now.  Slidescreen turned out to not be customizable enough and too social-networking heavy for me.  In a perfect world, here is what I want to see when I turn the phone on:
   • A small calendar widget so that I can see what appointments I have – I sync google calendar and my exchange calendar, so either is fine.  Agenda Widget is perfect for this and has lots of sizes.
   • A somewhat larger email widget that shows me the most recent messages for BOTH accounts.  Not there yet.
   • Time, date and local weather widget.  Beautiful Widgets does this while providing me with a bunch of nice widgets for doing things like setting the phone to silent.
   • A small task management widget.  Astrid has one, and I’ve asked the guys at GTDAgenda about adding one.
   • Optimally a little extra space for a couple of small widgets – one for silent mode and a shortcut to call my husband.

However these aren’t showstoppers; each of the three things I want to resolve works now, just not quite as optimally as I might like.

Over the next few weeks I will be posting about how I am changing my organizational system based on the integration of my day job, academic work and teaching.  The phone will be at the core of that because I’m at too many different computers to localize my work to one place.  Hopefully you will find this  useful.

If you are an android user and have any app or use suggestions, leave a comment or email me!

What is gtdagenda?

gtdagenda.com is a web-based implementation of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology.  The site gives you the ability to track, work at and associate tasks with all different levels of goals.

At the top level you can set broad goals (such as Finish my PhD) that guide your choice of projects.  These can be defined with a time frame, a category (such as Academic, Family, Work), and a priority (which GTD purists will recognize as NOT being part of the core GTD methodology but a piece I have long thought was missing).  Goals can be viewed sorted by either priority or category, offering the chance to see if things are out of balance (for example having far more goals in the Work category than the Family category).

One thing I really like about the application is that the top two goals remain at the top of the page as you move through other parts of the application.  This helps in keeping them always in focus.

Within each goal you can define Projects.  These conform to the standard GTD definition of a project, are associated with one of the larger goals, and again have a priority.  Again, these can be sorted by either priority or the goals to which they are related.

One neat feature of the Projects list is that it shows you how many tasks are associated with each project.  Projects with no tasks need to be revisited or have their priorities changed to reflect their lower importance.

Interestingly, notice that my top two projects are related to a goal that is not in my top two goals.  Something for me to review.

Anyway, within each Project there are Tasks. (No picking on my task lists; the details are in the notes, but each is actually just a single sit-down-and-do-it activity I should probably add some action verbs though.)

There are a few neat features to the task list display.

• Starred items are next actions and they always float to the top of your task list.  There is also another view that shows you just the next actions.
• Contexts are immediately visible, as are the project to which the task is associated
• You can mark multiple tasks as done by putting a check in the box and clicking the button for Mark as Done
• You can schedule repeating tasks (such as grading), add notes to yourself, and set a due date if that makes sense for the task.
• Overdue items have bright red highlighting of the date the item was due to increase visibility.
• You can modify many settings (priority, setting as a next action, moving to someday/maybe) from the menu.  This lets you make the change to several tasks at a time without having to edit each one.

So far all these have been in the left pane of the application.  The right pane brings a number of other useful features.

Let’s start at the bottom.

You have a list of your projects.  Clicking on any given project will give you a list of the tasks for that project.  Notice again that the number of tasks is shown clearly next to the project name.

Above that you have a list of your contexts.  Clicking on a given context will allow you to see only the tasks for that context.

On top there is a calendar, and it’s there to show you more than just the date.  You can schedule things like standing appointments (classes taught) on there as well has scheduling tasks for or due a particular date.  When you click on the date, the tasks for that date open up.

An interesting addition is the Checklists.  This is an implementation of the personal development concept called “Don’t Break the Chain” (sometimes attributed to Jerry Seinfeld), wherein you get a check mark for each time you do something that is unscheduled but a habit you are trying to build.  You add each one, set up the days you intend to do them, and check them off as you go.  Given the struggle many of us have with these types of habit-building activities, this is a good way to track them.  Notice also that you can have checklists at different levels – things like “give the dogs their heartworm medication” can go on the Month frame.  When the due day of the week (or month or year) comes up, these items appear on your task list.

There are a few more features that most potential users will find very helpful.  First, there is an email address you can send a task to and have it added to your lists.  There is also an iCal feed so that you can show your tasks on your google calendar or any other ical-compatible calendar program.

There are several settings for your account; do you want tasks and/or calendar items emailed each morning, what view you want opened when you log in, your timezone, etc.

Finally access from your phone has been streamlined on their www.gtdagenda.mobi site.  While not full featured (yet), it offers quick and easy access to your task list from anywhere.

What works well

I am very impressed with the combination of productivity and organizational tools offered here.  The integration of two items I’ve though were long missing from core GTD (priorities and  checklists) works well, and I love that checklist items show up on your tasks for the day in question.

I am particularly impressed with what a great job the tool does of keeping you focused on properly using the system and not getting too buried in the day to day task list.  It is very easy to get focused on a list of next actions and forget the larger goals; these items are in constant view and attached to each project, so that the larger purpose of what you are doing is always there.

Performance has been fine, and I have not stumbled on anything I would call a bug.

Dan (the developer) has been very responsive to questions and/or suggestions for improvements.  He continues to actively improve the application, taking into account the comments of current users and soliciting their opinions.

What could use some improvement

All that having been said, there are some items that need improvement.

• There is no syntax that you can use to enhance emailed tasks the way Remember the Milk allows.  This to me is the biggest current flaw, because while I can email myself a task I have to go back in later and add all the attributes.
• There are no start/end dates for schedules.  I would prefer to be able to put my academic calendar in far in advance, but can’t because the items begin showing up immediately.  This is my number two current biggest flaw.

Other items that should be addressed, but which I don’t consider to be a big deal.

• No file attachments, so if it isn’t a short text you are out of luck.  An oversight, but not one that is critical for my purposes.
• I find the schedules feature very confusing to use.
• Entering lots of tasks is a bit tedious as far as overhead goes.  Supposedly a new feature is on its way to address this.  Bulk upload would be terrific.
• I personally would like a way to mark a task as delegated/waiting for and make it disappear until some future date when I need to check on it.  I can use contexts for delegated/waiting for, but the item will remain on my task list.
• Right now when I “Mark as done” one or more tasks, the tool crosses them off but doesn’t remove them from view, even when my current view is Active only.  I would like them to disappear without having to refresh my screen.
• Two-way ical integration (so that scheduled items from google calendar can be picked up) would be very nice.

Pricing

In a perfect world this tool would be free and open to all.  In the real world, developers of new products often need to charge in order to support development.  Such is the case with gtdagenda.

Anyone can sign up for a free account, but it is limited in the number of goals, projects and context.  If your life revolves around a few large projects this may be enough.

Most people will need at least the Basic level.  At a few dollars per month (less if you autorenew) the cost is relatively low for the completeness of the application.  All payments are through paypal and they offer a 30-day money back guarantee for you to try the full product.

Premium is for those who need a LOT more goals / projects / contexts or checklists.

Recently they have also added 2 different shared accounts for work groups, one with 5 and the other with 15 users.  These offer, in addition to the features of the premium level, your own subdomain, message board and branding.

Overall Assessment

Despite desired improvements, gtdagenda.com is the  best consolidated GTD implementation currently available as a web application.  It implements the methodology in a clean, usable interface and adds the things that many GTD users have long thought were missing from the original specification.  By managing all the cross-referencing between goals, projects and tasks, GTDagenda makes it easy to keep an eye on the big picture while working through your daily activities.

As mentioned above this review was based upon a free premium-level membership.  Were this being paid out of my own pocket, my review would not change but I would choose the basic membership instead.  It is generous enough in terms of projects and goals to meet the needs of my life and nothing I do is secretive enough to require SSL security.  When they add file attachments, my guess is that the Premium pricing will be more attractive for those with lots of (or large) files.

I have reverted to paper note taking for a class I am in this semester (Cognitive Psychology).  For some reason, the act of writing the notes in pen helps them make the jump from short-term to long-term memory. (I blame this on growing up in the pre-digital age and training myself to learn this way.)  I’m doing the same thing at work; despite taking my laptop to every meeting, I am carrying a small Circa binder into which I make notes and add to do items.

The reason this works better is because, short of getting myself a tablet pc, there are things I just can’t do with a keyboard that I do all the time on paper.

• Draw myself pictures to help me remember something
• Draw lines between a current thought and one noted earlier to make it clear how they are related to one another
• Color code my notes (do-able on screen, but takes a bit more time than just trading pens)
• The occasional mind map (again, do-able on screen but requires learning  a new tool)

Having said that, all is not quite where I want it to be.  This method works well for taking down information and getting it into my head, but the to do aspect is not working nearly as well.  My work to do list still lives in email primarily, although I try to write one out every monday, and my home to do list *blush* lives mostly in my head and my gmail.

Therefore I am going to try using GTDAgenda for the next month.  It is a pay service, although the cost is relatively low, but of all the electronic implementations of the GTD methodology this one includes all of the core features plus a few others that seem highly useful to me.  For example, it gives you the ability to create checklists for repetitive tasks such as dealing with the administrative items for each of my classes every weekend. At the end of the month I will be posting a full review of the product along with results of my new approach.

In the meantime, however, I want to make it clear that paper has its place in my system.  Research on memory has shown that making connections between new information and what we know already is critical to memory, and paper provides a more free-form way for me to do that.  Further, the act of writing for me is an input device for my brain, whereas the act of typing is an output device.  That makes taking notes on paper a better option even if I never look at them again.

At first, this is a massively tempting idea.  I have certainly spent the summer bringing myself up to speed for a new course I’m teaching by listening to podcasts of classes from Berkeley and MIT, and consider these types of resources invaluable for an adult who wants to fill out their knowledge on a topic or learn something new.  Yet we get a great deal more from college than just topic knowledge. 

I see a few problems with this model that the article fails to address:

•  We produce an awful lot of ill-prepared high school graduates in this country.  Almost 42 percent of  freshmen enrolled in public 2-year colleges and 20 percent of those enrolled in public 4 year colleges were enrolled in at least one developmental course (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2004).  These students will be unable to read and learn from this type of material without a person to go to, and may not be able to complete the work at all without being pushed to complete the developmental coursework.
• Many of these same struggling students are first generation college students who lack the cultural capital to understand the process.  For better or worse, the structure of a traditional school helps ensure that those students find their way through the process.  Even though there are holes in how the system works now, leaving students to find their own way will only make that worse.
• Students get a lot more from college than just topic knowledge.  Even if we treat it as some form of white-collar trade school, students learn teamwork and presentation skills, make contacts within their field, and build valuable social skills in the college process.  I have serious doubts about how well an online school can teach those things.    
• Colleges serve many purposes outside of teaching undergraduates.  Some are extraneous, while others are irreplaceable.  Where will basic research be done?  The kind of stuff for which there isn’t a market yet, but which the engineers and scientists will need to know to build the next generation of technology?  How and where will we train future PhD’s, either to do research or to teach?  Why would someone WANT to go down that path when their work has been devalued.  (Note: I have a real problem with the ancient apprentice / indentured servant model of doctoral education we have now, but I don’t see an improvement here; more like extinction.)
• One of the things that colleges do is force students to think about other perspectives.  This in part comes from the fact that many academics have perspectives that bare little resemblance to those held by the general public, and can be abused the way some push ideology, but is none the less an important part of school.  The same goes for taking subjects that may not appear immediately interesting.  No one would take my statistics class if they weren’t required to, yet many tell me later that it is one of the most broadly useful classes they have taken. 
• The past 50 years has seen credential creep; where you used to be able to support a family with a high school diploma, you now need a bachelor’s degree to get in the door and a master’s to get promoted.  Will this be the antidote, showing that knowledge and credentials are only loosely correlated?  Or will this make it worse by further devaluing degrees until the checker at Walmart needs a degree in Finance to get the job?
• Moreover how do we differentiate the person who listened to the Berkeley podcasts from the person who went to class, wrote the papers and took the tests?  I suppose one could ask if we need to, but few employers are willing to “take your word for it” rather than call your references.  A degree serves a similar function; it is an external stamp that you stuck it out, did the work adequately (although adequate changes from school to school), have at least some knowledge of the topic, can follow rules and can deal with the culture of a bureaucratic organization.

I agree with the article that something needs to change about how we do higher education, but this model seems primarily suited to turn it into a white-collar trade school, focused at the (albeit much larger) undergraduate level and suited principally to self-motivated students with sufficient cultural capital to navigate the process in a meaningful way.  That may be good for some students, but is unlikely to work for all, and genuinely harmful to some.

It is for this reason that keeping good backups is paramount to success as an academic.

There are a number of techniques for keeping good backups as an academic.  I want to not have to think about them at all,  and my history in the IT world makes me want redundancy for the most important items.  Since I got to spend this weekend restoring due to a fried power supply killing a motherboard, I wanted to share some of the variety of things I do to make sure my work is safe.

Secondary/External hard drives:  Just because your machine only came with one does not mean you can’t install more.  And they aren’t expensive or hard to install either; if you can plug something into a USB port, you can add 1 Terabyte of external storage for $87.00.

Once the secondary drive is in, you can use a free piece of software such as Syncback and configure it to back up all of your documents to your external drive on a regular basis.  Lifehacker has an excellent explanation of how to backup your hard drive using Syncback.

A secondary drive accomplishes two things; first, it provides a backup of your drive and second, it is easy to move to a new system when the old one breathes its last breath (as mine did this weekend).

However, I’m paranoid.  What happens if my house burns down?  Or my computer is physically stolen?  Or I take multiple power spikes and both drives get fried?  These things are less likely, but not impossible.  For that reason, I also use off-site backups.

I use  Jungledisk for my off-site backup software.  Jungledisk makes use of Amazon’s S3 or other network storage solutions to back up my drives automatically.  The result is an invisible background backup solution for all your data to a remote location.  A few clicks and it has begun its restore.

I picked Jungledisk because Amazon S3 is very reasonably priced and I wanted to back up, well, everything.  Moreover Jungledisk gives me web access to every file I have backed up, so that I can get items when I’m not at home.  If, however, you only want to back up some key stuff (your writing, lecture notes, but NOT data or downloaded PDFs of research articles) there are a couple of free ways to do that.

• Mozy is an online backup service that gives you 2G of space at no cost.  You can, of course, buy more.  To my knowledge you can’t get to the files except through the Mozy backup tool.
• Dropbox is actually more of a file syncing tool; you can put your key items into your drop box and it will sync them to as many computers as you want.  I am currently doing this for my OneNote notebooks and my lectures in process.  Dropbox also provides web access to those files, so that I can get to them from anywhere.

I use Dropbox because I like it’s immediacy and web access for my most crucial files.  However pre-Jungledisk I used Mozy’s free service for my key files and was very happy with it.

One last important thing; if you are using Zotero for reference management, be sure to check out the version 2.0 beta.  I have had no problems with it, and love it’s ability to sync my files and library.  I use it with my Jungledisk account to keep copies of attached PDFs.

In the end the least productive thing you can do is re-do all your work because of a technology glitch.  Making sure you have extra copies of everything is one of the most important, productive things you can do.

You may know already that a lot of journal publishers allow you to sign up for an email or RSS feed of that journal’s table of contents.  Unfortunately you have to set those up one by one, and that process can be quite tedious.

Enter TicTOCs, a service that provides access to a wide range of RSS feeds for journal tables of contents.  You can choose the journals you are interested in, export the list to an OPML file and then import that into your RSS reader, subscribing to the table of contents for all the journals you chose.  When a new issue is released, the table of contents appears in your reader and you can review it for any articles or authors that are important to your work.

This process was seamless in Google Reader.  I picked a bunch of journals, exported and imported, and less than 2 minutes later began seeing journal tables of contents appear in my reader.

The service doesn’t provide you with access to the journals themselves, only the tables of contents, so once you find an article of interest you will still need to go to your university library site to get the article.  The journal list is also limited; Sage, ProQuest and a few others participate, but many of the big publishers do not.  Nonetheless TicTOCs spead up the process of getting subscribed to the relevant journals and saved me time finding them all one by one.

• Evernote is great if you are organizing lots of OTHER people’s content.
• OneNote is great if you are the one generating the content and need to organize it

• Evernote is a clear winner if you work at a lot of different locations or on a number of different platforms.   It has a number of mobile platforms so that you can take notes and add items on the go.
• OneNote is intimately integrated with Office, making working with it a no-brainer.  It is also tightly integrated with Outlook for tasks, calendar, and email.

Honestly, I’m still moving forward with OneNote.  I am also considering getting it for my machine at work, so that I can get very familiar with the app by using it in both places.    But I can also see how an undergrad or a more web-oriented project might work better in Evernote.

A voice recorder and Dragon Naturally Speaking for note taking while reading:

The experiment: I would speak into a voice recorder, summarizing what I was reading as I read it.  Then when I was done I would plug the voice recorder in to my computer, download the recording and use Dragon to convert it to text that I could then keep as searchable notes.

The result: Basically unsuccessful.  It worked, but I learned a few things in the process.

1. Dragon has a lot of great editing capabilities, but you need to be speaking as it converts in order to correct the errors it makes.  Working off a recording requires very accurate speech.
2. I don’t speak accurately enough to make this work.  I ramble, I am not succinct about my notes, and I make errors that Dragon doesn’t know what to do with.  I found that I was taking as much time to edit the results as I would have spent had I just typed them in initially.
3. The writing process does force you to organize your thoughts in a way that speaking doesn’t.  This is part of why my notes were so rambling and incoherent.
4. Any background noise at all made it hard for Dragon to convert the speech to text.  Since I read with classical music on (old habit; keeps me focused locally instead of hearing every noise throughout the house) the recordings I was making were less than clear, making Dragon perform even worse.

I do intend to work with Dragon more as an “in front of the computer transcription” tool, although I’m not ready for that yet.

Zotero

The experiment:  A new way of tracking my references, which are extensive, and spitting bibliographies into documents.

The results:  Resounding Success!  With one exception, Zotero can automatically suck in references as I search (entering far more information about a reference than I would manually) and spit it out into a very wide variety of formats.  (The exception is HWWilsonWeb sites, such as Education Full Text, which uses a non-standard metadata format.  Zotero is working on it.)

I was able to import my EndNote references and have more than doubled the size without a single hint of a performance problem.  Their latest versions offer ways to use a single library from multiple computers, addressing the only real limit I had found with the product.  I uninstalled EndNote, if that tells you anything.

Ongoing Experiments

I still have two experiments going on.

Bamboo tablet to hand-write notes: I just got the tablet a week ago and am still working with this.  So far I have discovered that too many years of typing has caused my handwriting to go into the toilet.  It is taking some practice to get used to writing on the tablet, and right now it is slower than typing.  It is possible that this will end up being something I use to overlay my typed notes with arrows, circles, connections, etc.

OneNote: This is working out well so far; It has yet to not be able to do anything I have wanted, although there are a few key tests yet to perform.  I am specifically concerned about tagging capabilities and the ability to search based on tags, but need to get more data into it before I will be able to truly test this out.

There are three items on my “just starting to be tested” list:

• gtdagenda.com – an application for implementing gtd online.  It includes the capability of both calendar events and scheduled items like classes, has a concept of a goal above projects, which means that the goal can be completing my dissertation but I can break down the projects better, and so far appears to be the best web-based gtd implementation I have seen so far.  However I haven’t had a chance to put a lot into it, so it needs a lot more testing before I can recommend it.
• WikidPad – a wiki software that runs locally on your machine (so backups are your own business and as good as you make them; mine are very good).  Most interestingly is that if you type a word with more than one capital letter in it it will automatically link that to other places where that same word appears.  This makes linking between different documents REALLY easy.  Worth more exploration, particularly if tagging in OneNote is too weak for what I need.
• scholarz.net – recommended in a comment, this is an online service that lets you organize your references, add notes to them and create document outlines/shells.  It also adds a social networking/community aspect, since you can collaborate and share your reference library.  It is being developed by a group of academics in Germany, and is interesting so far.  I like that it is being developed by “practitioners” rather than IT geeks who think they know what is needed.  For that reason alone, I need to spend more time with it and give it a good hard look.

Of course, there are technologies that I use that have become so integrated I hardly think about them anymore:

• Jungledisk and Amazon S3 for backups, since losing my work would set me back years
• Firefox for browsing, along with a wide variety of plug-ins
• A label printer, file folders and hanging files for organizing paper
• Gmail, Gcal, Greader, etc.  Also Gmail Backup, a program to download your Gmail periodically to files on your hard drive that can be backed up in case of a problem.
• Microsoft Office (primarily because it is everywhere I work, teach, and learn)
• SPSS (because my advisor uses it and can be more helpful if I do)
• The usual assortment of lifehacker-suggested software for things like antivirus, malware protection, etc.

Did I miss anything?  Once some of these evaluations are complete I’ll post an updated summary.  In the meantime, drop me a comment if you think know of a good productivity enhancing tool for an academic that you think I might find useful!

Brum wrote:

I tried the tablet and it did not work for me. I think it is more important to get all your data and (immediate) thoughts into one database. I use the Evernote software to do this. I scan all readings into PDF and pile all the snippets and ideas into EN, tag them and retag them with hierarchical tags until the structure of the paper emerges. EN can do handwriting as well, but I rarely use it now. The ability to take a note from PDF or add new idea with confidence that I find it later is the important thing (no more thousands of doc files or OneNote sheets); handwriting isn’t.

I’d be interested in hearing more about how you are using tags.  I created ones for key subject areas of the literature review as well as methodology, but I would be amazed if the tags stay as they are now.  My biggest current Onenote worry is that its tagging capabilities won’t be up to the task.

The tablet showed up today, so once I install it I will be able to experiment with how much handwriting works.  But that leads me to another thought…   Jeremy wrote:

This has been one of the areas I’ve struggled with and haven’t come to a good conclusion. A question: Does Onenote allow a link/embedding to a PDF file of the article? A strength of Zotero is the ability to drop a PDF into it which copies the PDF into the Zotero library allowing an easy backup.

In general I think I’m futzing too much with my system and just need to press forward.

Onenote does allow you to link to a PDF document, although I still do that into Zotero.  The goal of Onenote is really to create a consolidated place for my notes that can be searched and organized in a way that I can find them again.

However it was this last sentance that really resonated with me.  It’s so very easy to keep playing with the system and avoid actually using it.  I’ve been known to do that with GTD implementations, and I am quite obviously doing it with the tablet.

Finding that balance between futzing and improving a system is critical;  In the end, it’s about putting something in place that you will use and building the habits to make it useful.  For me, that means setting a hard deadline.  After this week I’m going to use what I have for a month and then revisit it.  I might change at that point, or I might not.  But to move forward, there has to be an end to the planning and a start to the work.  That will be Saturday.

So I am going to try a technology experiment.  First, I will be (*DEEP BREATH*) upgrading this machine to Vista.  Then I will be installing a Wacom Bamboo Graphics Tablet on which I can write my notes directly into Onenote.  If this works and I find myself using it a lot I may explore a tablet PC in the future, but this is an inexpensive way to get the functionality (hand write and the computer can read it) without spending $1000 on a new computer.