A few things geek me out more than others. When it comes to smartphones these things include apps for music, reading, and organization. That last one might stick out a bit from the first two — I’m not really sure why smartphones inspire such a passion for organization, but they do. I guess it’s the idea that it’s always at my side, ready to remind me of what needs doing. Yet I frequently struggle with the organizational system. I just need something that works the way my brain does. That’s why I’ve been rocking Pocket Informant, a new organizational app for Android. After years of struggling to keep my work and personal lives in order, I finally borrowed a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen. It changed the way I think about organizing my affairs. Instead of trying to process an endless number of individual tasks, GTD involves batching those tasks into projects and working on them one step at a time. It also focuses on having everything available in one place. That’s perfect for us smartphone geeks. We have a tool that can divide up projects into tasks and keep everything in one place. All we need is a bit of software to make it all easy. 
When I saw that James Kendrick reviewed Pocket Informant for Android, I was all ears. Surprisingly, in all my years of working on smartphones I haven’t actually used this one yet, even on my BlackBerry. Before I even finished reading his review I downloaded it, and since then I’ve been using it constantly. It fits perfectly for any organizational system, and especially for the GTD acolyte. Pocket Informant integrates automatically with your Google Calendar, which gives you a good starting point. Why not, then, just use Google Calendar? Because Pocket Informant offers so many more features. I also like the layout a bit better. You can set it to the standard daily, weekly, and monthly view, and even in this I think the interface is a bit better than G Calendar. In addition it has an agenda view, which is a slightly different take than the other three. It certainly gives the user plenty of options in viewing events. The tasks feature, though, is what sets apart Pocket Informant. There are just so many ways to categorize a task. You can set a start and end date, including an alarm. Give your task a status and importance. You can then dump it into a specific folder — perfect for projects — and assign it a context. There’s even a spot for you to define the action, another GTD staple. There’s a certain satisfying feeling after clicking Next Action. It just feels like the task is going to get done. While the tasks do not sync with Google Tasks, they do sync with Toodledo, which is an excellent, and free, task management system. If you want to organize your life and think your Android can help, I strongly suggest giving Pocket Informant a whirl. Not only is it excellent, but it’s also free. And, even better, we should get more features in the future. This is a public beta version. In other words, PI is only getting better. You can snag it now in the Market.
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