When you employ someone it is so that they may add more value to the product than you would be able to do alone. The added value should outweigh the employee’s cost to you.
What if you could carry such a value adding employee in your pocket? What if they are always available to assist you as and when you need them?
Consider the product as your life, and the employee as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). The electronic device helps you to get more out of life by efficiently managing your resources, especially time, for you.
Some essential criteria I look for in my PDA employee:
Ease of input.
It is of no use having a system that takes a long time to record simple information. In a busy environment your natural tendency is to drop it and use something quicker. I prefer a PDA with a physical keypad for this reason. No waiting, as on touch screen devices. Plus it’s much easier to enter information on bumpy bus journey, for example.
Ability to reorder inputs
On first entry the information is usually a draft. The system must allow for easy reordering as your plans take more structure. All systems allow reordering, though some more easily than others. So the chosen PDA would have simple context sensitive menus, possibly with shortcuts.
Ability to edit inputs
Again, all systems allow the editing of input as the information is further refined, but there are differences between how easy it is to do this. The ability to use shortcuts can make the difference between a simple quick edit, or no edit made as the large required effort is not worth it.
Calendar management
How easy is it to manage your schedule? Can you view your schedule in monthly, weekly, summary formats? How quick and intuitive is it to use? My selected PDA must answer positively to each of these questions in its interview.
Task management
Again managing tasks is a major functional requirement of the chosen PDA. Sometimes specialist software may be added on to the PDAs natural abilities to cope better with task management.
Be pocket sized
If the PDA doesn’t fit in a pocket or handbag easily it’s unlikely you’ll have it to hand when you need it most. Small and compact are the key elements here. An additional element is having a good battery life. A small and compact PDA with a flat battery is just a paperweight.
After having tried a few PDAs, the system I’ve evolved to using at the time of writing this is an old Blackberry. I may say more of this at a later date.
