LifeHacker asks the question, “How does your daily routine compare with Ben Franklin’s?” You remember, the author of “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Apparently, at least in print, his daily schedule involved rising at 5AM, in order to address himself to “Powerful Goodness” and prepare for the day, by, among other things, asking, “What good shall I do this day?” The day ends, at a reasonable time, with Franklin asking, “What good have I done today?” Notice, in this listing of his daily routine, he gets about 7 hours sleep. But no one accused Ben Franklin of being a slacker.

What questions do you put in your schedule, to keep you on track? What daily activities/reflection/disciplines keep you focused on your most important goals for the day? Do you use ClearSync to keep your appointments, or to remind you to reflect on your day and purpose good in it? Or do you do that automatically? Or not at all? Perhaps a daily repeating untimed event could show up, “Remember to reflect on my day and be grateful for small things.”

Titanic: The Titanic’s original maiden voyage was to be March 20, 1912. But during the last year of its construction, its sister ship the Olympic sustained damage from an encounter with HMS Hawke due to poor scheduling of the shipping lanes in the Solent, the stretch of water separating the Isle of Wight from the English mainland. What began as a simple scheduling error cascaded into a tragedy of colossal proportions. To repair the Olympic, many of Titanic’s construction crew were diverted for work on its less-ill-fated sister ship. This ended up postponing the Titanic’s maiden voyage by three weeks, until April 10, 1912.
Most of history’s iceberg shipwrecks have occurred in the months of April – August, when the glaciers are calving at the height of their season. A March launch could have seen the Titanic move through its transatlantic trip without incident. Rather, on its maiden voyage, the Titanic’s captain and its owners were determined to wow the watching world with a speedy trip for a ship of its size and status. The ship’s captain, believing the advance publicity of the unsinkability of his ship, took few precautions as the Titanic blasted through the iceberg-laden waters of the North Atlantic. In his confidence, the captain retired to his bed while his pilot and crew entered the treacherous and ultimately fatal portion of their final journey. Of course, we know that the iceberg struck the starboard side of the ship, and slashed open the four chambers that, as they filled, sealed the doom of the not-so-“unsinkable” ship. But had the Olympic not been at the wrong place at the wrong time months before, it would not have sustained the damage that delayed the construction that delayed the launch that doomed the ship that ended the lives of 1500 passengers and crew.

The iconic Hindenburg disaster almost certainly would not have happened, or with so much loss of life, if the schedule had not been put out of whack by weather-related delays. The Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany on May 3, and on the morning of May 6th it was about six hours behind schedule when it achieved land over Boston on its way to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Manchester, New Jersey. Its landing was further delayed by stormy weather at Lakehurst, and so the airship took a tour of Southern New Jersey coastline while waiting for the storm to pass.

But the tragedy to come could not have been foreseen by the ground crew called to muster at the docking point. Sadly, they were not ready to perform their critical duties as the fated ship pulled into the station for the first time, after having been delayed almost 12 hours from the original scheduled landing. So the ship took what then seemed to be a harmless stroll around the airfield to get in position again in 15 minutes, by which time the crew would be ready to tie the ship down and unload the passengers. Those 15 minutes turned out to be the last 15 minutes of the lives of the thirty-six crew and passengers who perished in the fiery wreck. Had the crew been ready to receive the ship when it first arrived, the death toll may very well have been just a fraction of this total.

Lincoln’s Assassination: President Lincoln had come out of his wartime depression, and was unusually cheerful and upbeat on the morning of April 14, 1865. All the news from the war lately was encouraging, and it seemed as if the Confederacy couldn’t last much longer. He and his wife Mary had plans to attend Ford’s Theater that evening. John Wilkes Booth, an actor, had stopped by Ford’s during the day to collect his mail, and he overheard the news that Lincoln and General Grant were to be attending the theater together. This was the chance he had been looking for—killing both Lincoln and Grant in the same attack would deal the Union a mortal wound that might give the Confederacy time to recover. (As it turns out, Grant did not plan to attend.)

The first schedule mishap that evening almost prevented the President from attending the play, which would have saved him. Missouri Senator John B. Henderson came to the White House to personally appeal for a pardon for a Confederate spy sentenced to die. Lincoln had more compassion on this Confederate than he was later shown by Booth, and he granted the pardon, his ironic, and yet fitting, final presidential act. Arriving late to Ford’s theater, the play already in progress, Lincoln and his wife were installed in their box seats before their bodyguard showed up. This second schedule mishap was the crucial one—the bodyguard assigned to protect the President came late and left early from his appointed station outside the President’s box. He therefore offered no impediment to Booth, who likely would not have been able to succeed in his fatal intentions if he had been met with threatening force.

The Google security glitches received a lot of press. The two main concerns focused on both the performance and security of the calendar application and customer support responsiveness. While the security issue was a quick fix, the support issue lingers. Users are now paying for support over the phone to receive the appropriate answer to their problem. Consumers are willing to pay as long as someone actually does get to them.

Frustrated with the lack of response, users are migrating to paid solutions. With ClearSync, even if there is a small hiccup (glitch happens, right?), our tech support works hard to attend to each and every customer in a timely fashion. This is what makes ClearSync stand out from the crowd: data security is always taken into consideration while a viable solution is appropriated to each and every customer to suit a specific need.

Sometimes it takes a study to confirm what a moment’s reflection would indicate. Microsoft sponsored a study that confirmed that Cloud computing for business uses less energy. More and more companies are putting their business processes, collaborative efforts, marketing, sales and invoicing in the cloud to save energy, environment, and even to reduce their IT costs. ClearSync as a tool for delivering value for price reduces communication and coordination costs, allowing our small to mid-size businesses to offer their services for less and beat out the competition. ClearSync can help your service business deliver cost effective customer solutions.

If you have begun to try out ClearSync for Android, here are some usage tips. If you have not yet had the pleasure of using CS for Android, I encourage you to sign up for our beta test program by sending an email to support [at] clearsync.com.

Customizing Your Experience

• Font Size: Increase or decrease the size of text displayed by tapping [Menu][Preferences], then [Theme Text Size].
• Changing the Theme: To change the set of colors used to display your information, tap [Menu][Preferences] and then choose a theme in the drop down list.
• Alias: If you wish to keep your ClearSync User Name confidential on your phone, inside the Account Selector, tap on [Change Alias].
• Sync Frequency: The minimum sync interval is 2 minutes, but you can set your sync interval to a longer period of time to save on battery life, or you can always manually sync by tapping [Menu], [Sync Now].

Finding and Displaying Your Data

• Contact Search: You can search for a contact by the alphabetized letter from A-Z by touching the alphabet bar along the top of the screen at the appropriate place. You can search for a contact by category by touching the color bar along the top of the screen, selecting a contact category to correspond to the color.
• Calendars or Contacts Displayed: To select/unselect a number of calendars or contact categories displayed, tap on the [ClearSync logo] at the bottom.
• Last Sync Time: You can always find out what your last sync time was by the information displayed at the upper left hand corner next to the ClearSync logo. It also displays how much data was transmitted in the last sync.

Creating, Editing and Deleting Contact Lists and Calendars

• Creating a Resource: To create a calendar on the Android, tap on the [ClearSync logo] at the bottom, then tap [Calendar Manager], and finally tap [New].
• Resource Name and Color Change: To edit the name, description or color of a certain calendar on the Android, tap on the [ClearSync logo] at the bottom, then tap [Calendar Manager], and finally tap [Edit]. For contact lists, tap the [Category Manager] in the same way.
• Deleting a Resource: To delete a calendar on the Android, tap on the [ClearSync logo] at the bottom, then tap [Calendar Manager], select the calendar and finally tap [Delete]. For a contact list, do the same with the [Category Manager] while in the contacts area.
• Sharing Calendars and Contact Lists: You can use your phone to set up sharing groups, but it may be simplest to use a computer browser to navigate to www.clearsync.com and log-in. Then, you will be able to set up sharing groups, share calendars and contact information, subscribe to the same information from other people, and set up web pages to display your calendar information.