Innovative use of WhizFolders as a textual calendar
"I was looking for a good place to jot down appointments, but didn't feel like installing a PIM ... most of which had far more features than I needed. Then I remembered that some people use 3x5 index cards, labeled with the days of the week, etc.""Well, it occurs to me that WhizFolders is very much like a card catalog. All I needed was a way of adding one topic per day ... not a small order! Then I read about the feature "Add Topics from a Text File ...." I wrote a small perl script just to generate a list of text lines (each starting with "Topic:") and containing a formatted date string. I even threw in dividers for weeks and months. Then I imported the whole thing into WhizFolders and voila!"
"Not only can I now record future appointments in their own dated topic and record important daily events as they happen ... but I can also create task topics and slide them through the stack of topics."
"For example, say I wanted to remember to go grocery shopping every Wednesday. I could create a topic called "Grocery Shopping" and then place it after the next Wednesday topic. As soon as it was done, I would select it and use the topic movement buttons to slide it down after the next Wednesday.This is an easier way to keep track of cyclical tasks then trying to enter them into every appropriate day-topic. Of course, this works the same for monthly, yearly, even seasonal tasks."
"Further, it is possible to add hyperlinks between topics. This would allow me to keep all of my notes on a particular complex job in one topic. But every day that I added any information could contain a link to that topic ... and that topic could even contain links back to the days on which I worked on it. The same technique could be used to plan a multi-stage event, like a party. Create a topic for the party, pick out the target days when certain milestones must be met, and link back and forth between the Party topic and the target dates topics. Now you can easily remember one week in advance to call the caterer and two days in advance to pick up the tent ... and all of the phone numbers, check list, notes, etc. exist in one topic referenced from multiple dates."
"OK, I'm not saying that this will completely replace full blown calendar apps. You cannot, for example, get a "week at a view" or a "month at a view" with this method. On the other hand, it combines the cool functionality of the "index card method" of calendaring (that I like so much) with the advantages of a digital, hyperlinked, application."
Steve Jarjoura
NOTE: Many thanks to Steve for this great idea and the sample calendar that he generated using a script. Now, I'm making such calendar files every year by a special program that I developed. You can download the latest such file from the following article and then use it in WhizFolders:
Get the latest year's Calendar file for WhizFolders