For me it was never easy to manage all things I had to do. But not only things I had to do were hard to handle, also appointments, timetables or anniversaries wanted to get organised. Whether using a hand-written planner or a software for that purpose depends on your personal preference, but it has to be fast and usable. I tried out Papyrus as an application that should help me getting things done and be supportive of my time management.
Review conditions
Of course Papyrus in the latest version 1.3 was my choice, using an E65 for testing purpose.
Installation
Nothing special to say about that. Installation is very easy, you do not have to do any special things to get Papyrus running.
First view
When starting Papyrus the first time I immediately noticed that Papyrus integrates into the system properly, loading all calendar items of my phone.
Moving around in the calendar works pretty fast. A nice feature is the cycle through the different views by pressing the right soft-key. Papyrus looks good at the first view, but let’s find out where the advantages over the built-in calendar are.
Main features
Naturally Papyrus is a tool to manage meetings, tasks, notes, reminders or anniversaries and view them in a manner that helps you getting things done in time. You can create all these different calendar items, just select a date with the direction keys, then select menu and what you would like to create. The create/edit view opens up, where you can easily set up everything you need.
You can set up start and ending times, alarms, create a series of meetings, add notes, categories or even attendees. Papyrus comes with quite a huge list of pre-defined categories, you can select multiple categories for every item. But why choose categories? Simply because you can set up filters on each view to show just the categories you would like to see. At work you might not be willing to be shown birthdays of family members. Another smart feature is the possibility of adding pre-defined text blocks where ever you can type in text. That is why you don’t need to write often used phrases again and again. I imagine that this could save a lot of time.
Ok, now we have some features that cannot be done with the build-in calendar, but where is the quantum leap? In my opinion Papyrus is worth the money because of the abilities to show events, list them, sort them, filter them, navigating through them and making everything look like you want it. At first there is the monthly view. Here you get an overview about the whole month. How much time of each day is occupied by your events can be seen by the small white bars. The blue areas are in use already. Secondly there is the grid view, that shows one week and every single event that takes place at a certain date. At last there is the list view, where you are presented all events of one week in a list, like the name says. The best of all these views is, that every view has its own special filter and sort functionality, that makes it really usable.
Another point where Papyrus performs very well is customisation. In the Settings menu you can set up nearly everything, from preferred views over icons for categories to different colours for events. You can also change settings for each of the four main views. I call that ideal.
Handling
For me the handling is one of the most important things on an application for time management. If it is hard to use you won’t use it in daily life. Papyrus passes this section pretty good. Navigating around the calendars is quick and easy, creating events, reminders or tasks works intuitively. I tested how long it takes to open Papyrus and create a new tasks with an alarm. It took me under a minute to do so, that is ok for a smartphone, but of course not as fast as you could do this when writing by hand.
Weaknesses
It is hard for me to find weaknesses in Papyrus. For my needs it offers full functionality. It didn’t crash or did any unexpected things. Did you find weaknesses?
Conclusion
Before installing Papyrus I was quite doubtful if it could be useful. Papyrus changed my opinion about what functionality a calendar has to offer. For self management Papyrus is very useful, it integrates into the existing calendar and let’s you sync all data with your computer. My rating is 5 of 5.
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Very good
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