Getting used to [my] Entourage.

In my meticulous quest to be fully prepared at all times, I often find myself drowning in a deluge of organizational applications and items - handwritten assignments and meetings in my planner, reminders and notes on the "stickies" on my laptop screen, and color-coded to-do lists and events on my beloved iCal.

A screenshot of my iCal for the month of September

While the advent of increased technology offers a number of brilliant benefits for those who in need of tools to balance their student or professional life (or, in my case, both), having too many different resources to check can become a bit unnerving and even counterproductive. You're bound to miss something important in the process of trying to simultaneously keep up with so much - it's inevitable. If only there were a way to streamline everything and have just one source for all your appointments and obligations - without walking around with a CrackBerry glued to your fingertips at all times.

For e-mail, a simplifier of sorts already exists: a few months ago, having three e-mail accounts became so much that I started using POP mail filters to have all my e-mail forwarded to one account. (If you're a Gmail user - or if you have almost any account - you can use this feature to simplify the number of e-mail accounts you have to keep up with on a regular basis.)

Unfortunately, a fourth, Microsoft Exchange-based graduate e-mail account - one that requires my daily attention, has extremely limited features on a Mac OS, and doesn't support the use of POP filters - was recently added to the technological mix. My new solution? Microsoft Entourage for Macs. It provides me the option to import e-mail accounts and organize practically every facet of my life.

It might take some time to get used to my Entourage, and I'd still like to find a way to import all the events and to-do lists tasks from my iCal so everything would be in one perfectly color-coded place; but the mere existence of a Microsoft-based program that has so many great organizational and e-mail features and runs so smoothly on Mac is enough to completely make my day (literally). I'm not a spokesperson for the company and I haven't even begun to learn all the odds and ends of the program, but it definitely has the potential to transform my general downpour of daily details and tasks into a more manageable trickle.

A pleasant update since the last post: With the help of my mom, I discovered the existence of soy nut butter, in its original, honey, and chocolate glory, and, more importantly, its lack of allergic-reaction inducing qualities (no peanuts, nuts, dairy, or gluten).