Are you scheduled enough?

Peter, my ever-innovative financial and planning manager, was excited this morning because he had just got a new "time management and daily scheduling program." We spent a good sixty minutes discussing the new software's many wonders.

"It increments scheduling in ten-minute segments and labels actions according to the clock," Peter said, almost spilling his coffee because of his welling enthusiasm.

I kept quiet on the fact that I did not exactly know what he was talking about.

"It will even tell you, a week ahead of time, if the scheduling is still on because it can sync with mobile phone messages and read from your PDA, whatever PDA you have."

I have no PDA and rarely do I receive mobile phone messages.

For all my polite, but obvious, lack of interest, Peter rattled on, happy like a three-year old slurping up the ice cream from a top-heavy cone about this new software avenue to daily scheduling bliss.

I realize that complex projects require complex planning -- and computers do that with aplomb -- but I, somehow, never got on the PDA, computer calendar, to-do-list-saved-on-the-cell-phone bandwagon. I am perhaps one of the very few in the whole building who simply does not bother with these things.

Peter is aghast, I know, that I do not have a Bluetooth thingy hanging over my ear (he has several and changes them according to a mysterious pecking order). He is equally petrified at the software bareness of my work station, and is forever hoping that I shall see, at last, the light.

Peter's world has the distinct ability to make me nervous. 

I find our daily work surroundings stressful enough without "scheduling in increments of ten minutes" and without cell phones that wake up suddenly with ding-dong sounds to tell us that we are expected at the conference room for the company's latest workplace etiquette briefing.

I live on the edge between peace and constant mental mayhem without printout charts showing me how my precious hours will be gobbled up ten days from now as my key contribution to man's most precious possession other than health, labor, gets apportioned among largely irrelevant and purposeless tasks that evolve over weeks at a time.

I recoil at the mere thought of another one of those notes from the boss, scribbled on white letterhead paper with a fountain pen emitting dark magenta ink, saying "This is great product; I want to see a copy every morning," without Peter's hour-by-hour outline of "required deadlines." 

I mourn every afternoon at the reality of another day having slipped away under the yoke without reviewing the team members' individual calendar pages on Miscrosoft Outlook.

In short, I can live, happily and blissfully, without a "time management and daily scheduling program."

"And you know what I've found on the Internet?" Peter beams as he strokes his Blackberry lying comfortably next to his company-supplied PDA. 

"A virtual keyboard so that I can do email via the Blackberry faster and more comfortably on the tabletop."

There's no hope.