Paper Versus Digital

I am for the most part a woman who has embraced technology. I love my blackberry and my laptop. It has been quoted by time-management professionals that to be effective, a person needs to choose whether they are paper or digital oriented and stick with one or the other.

What do professionals know anyway? I have noticed 2 things that defy my enjoyment of technology. First, I would rather read information from paper than a computer screen if given the choice and second, I am more satisfied by keeping a paper food journal than a digital one.

This is crazy because they have some great digital diet/exercise programs out there! I know because I've tried alot of them. There are some seriously cool mixes of food & exercise databases that can show you graphs and tell you the nutritional composition of everything about what you ate and how many calories you have burned so long as you are faithful to enter the data on a regular basis. They also allow you to enter food information that is not already in the database or create favorite "meals" so that multiple food choices can be selected with the touch of a button.

So why do I currently use a pen & a paper journal? Good question. To be honest, my fav digital program hasn't crossed over to Blackberry yet (I first experienced it as a Palm user) and BB diet software is akin to using DOS-based computer programs. Blah. I've been stalking Vidaone via email every couple months asking when their BB version will be released and they are assuring me that it will come soon. I will likely pay the token $10 fee to cross-over but am expecting to be disappointed as I have been with other favored Palm programs that tried to match their performance on a blackberry platform.

So, I resorted to the traditional book-bound diet & exercise journal (check out my blogs "Bringing It Together & Week of the Journal") and have found it extremely rewarding. Then I remembered other times where I was faithful to keep a journal and realized that my most profitable seasons of weight loss or maintenance were while using a paper journal.

Not sure why this appeals to me so much. Having to enter & re-enter the same foods & caloric values repetitively and resort to a office calculator to add up columns of numbers on a daily basis is so archaic. Having to go to the back of my journal to survey an alphabetical list of foods instead of typing in a couple letters and selecting from instantaneous drop-down lists--what am I thinking???

It is what it is. My last journal expired (it only holds 14 weeks) and it was time to get another one. I did the tedious chore of entering repetitive personal data (like my supplement doses & RMR) on every page and transferring my hand-written collection of foods that are not included in the alphabetical listing that comes with the book. Everything in my technology savvy mind goes "Waste of time. Go digital!" but I love my little black book and the entries/notes that I make in it every day. The daily two-page spread with my scrawl that is as varied and inconsistent as I am. It is the picture that no PDA can ever display in it's cold exactness and limitations. At least not yet, that is. Hmmm...I wonder what the I-Phone software has to offer....