A week ago from today, I bought my first cell phone. Using the money I worked for this summer at the Computer Academy, I was able to justify buying, arguably, one of the greatest cell phones on the market. While putting down the cash for the iPhone, I decided to buy a one year subscription to MobileMe. My justification was off-site backup for my precious college work; everything else was a bonus.
I hate MobileMe for one reason and one reason only. Although it’s a great service that I’m finding useful, I’ve had to readjust my entire workflow and calendaring system to accommodate its greatest flaw. While using an iPhone or iPod touch without MobileMe, the user may choose individual iCal calendars to sync to the device. While using MobileMe, in great contrast, calendar sync is all-or-nothing.
I depend on my calendaring system to keep me alive. It’s the hub of my events and small reminders of things I need to do. I use one main calendar, “Events”, to remind me of places I need to be or deadlines I need to meet. Then, I use one called “Alarms”, to remind me to do my Getting Things Done Weekly Review or to do household chores like checking up a water softener. Those calendar events are set up with an alarm that I’d like to see while sitting at my Mac – not while I’m on-the-go with my iPhone.
MobileMe’s system of forcing users to sync all calendars without any way to stop it makes the calendaring feature useless for me. It ruins one of the most important aspects of Getting Things Done (GTD), contexts. In Getting Things Done, David Allen writes that grouping tasks by context (often location) is more appropriate than priority. Having my phone vibrate to remind me to do my weekly review is useless while I’m away from my computer. I’d much rather just have the notification sitting on my Mac for when I return.
Apple, please fix this.
Image credit to the One More Thing blog at CNET.