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October 10, 2006
Handling completed calendar entries
A client asked us recently about handling completed calendar items on her Treo. There are some tips here that can apply to whatever system you use, but for you Treo users in particular, option #4 may be handy.
1. Do nothing. If it's within the same day, it may be obvious to you what has been completed on a review of the day's events. This is what I do.
2. Delete completed items. Downside of that is that there will then be no record of the entry.
3. Put the word DONE next to the entry which will still preserve it as an event in the Calendar.
4. Change the category on the Treo to Completed (a new category you can create). On the Treo, you can assign categories to Calendar entries so that a small colored circle appears next to the entry.
Select any Calendar entry on the Treo and tap the Details button.
Tap the drop-down menu next to Category, where it may say Unfiled.
I would suggest creating a new category called "Completed" under "Edit Categories."
When you complete an item, you can go back to this Details screen for the entry and change the Category to Completed. That way it will appear with that colored circle on the Treo for you. It's not a super obvious way of separating out Done items, but if may help.
A more obvious way to see what's done versus not done, may be to take it a step further, after changing the category to Completed, and filter your Palm daily calendar view to "Unfiled" instead of "All." This could work if you are only using the categories Unfiled (which is set by default for all calendar entries) and Completed (which you create). Then the Unfiled view will only show you what's left to be done for the day. You can filter your calendar in the top right corner of your screen by tapping on the word All and changing it to Unfiled.
There is no way on the Palm to select two categories at once (such as Urgent and Unfiled.) The only category that allows multiple categories is All.
Of course, many programs allow you to change the look of entries, to serve this same purpose as described in #4, if you want that functionality. In Outlook you could change the Label and in Lotus Notes you can go under Tools>Preferences>Colors and change the color for different calendar entries.
Hope this helps.
Kelly
Posted by Kelly at October 10, 2006 06:55 PM
Comments
The best solution of this is what ACT does. in ACT you can "Complete" items and have them either greyed out or strikethrough applied. Moreover, you can tell ACT not to show completed items at all, which is my preference.
Agendus (which has a Palm and Windows version) also has this, but it isn't as stable as I'd like :-/
Deleting completed items is a bad idea because I often want to go back and find out when a meeting was, etc.
Posted by: TjL at October 10, 2006 08:07 PM
I'm using Outlook/Treo 650 and Outlook keeps a copy of the completed task for me. I can go into the menu of the Tasks screen on my Treo (Options>Preferences) and check the box for "Show Completed Tasks" in order to view my completed tasks on my Treo again. Once I'm done reviewing, I turn the completed tasks off again on my Treo.
Posted by: CynicalGeek at October 11, 2006 06:41 AM
