A handy way to “fax” yourself.
Sometimes when I’m out working with my laptop, I come across something that really needs to be dealt with when I return to my desk at home. Maybe it’s something I’ll want to file, maybe I need to delegate it, or maybe it’s just something that I’ll want to put into my inbox and process later. A really handy way to do this is to print to your home printer in offline mode. Then, whenever you go home and plug back into your docking station/printer out will pop anything you chose to print while you were out. No thought required, which fits neatly into my philosophy of making systems as completely fool-proof as possible.
A place for everything.
Yesterday I spent four hours with my friend Allison helping her get her office (and a portion of her life) more organized. I’ve been using a lot of the principles from the book Getting Things Done
So now I’ve got a pretty good grasp on my work, and I’m not often “surprised” by things that used to slip through the cracks. And I got a real feeling of accomplishment helping Allison start doing the same thing for herself. Time is the one commodity they’re not making more of for any of us, so anything I can do to help people use it better seems like a worthwhile way to spend mine.
I think the Jott people are reading my thoughts.
I’ve been using a voice recorder to take action items in my car for a couple of years now, and since I started messing around writing VoiceXML applications I’ve wanted to create a simple telephone-based reminder service, and the guys at Jott seemed to have done it for me.
The way it works is you set up a Jott account, then you call their phone # (1-866-JOTT-123) and leave yourself a message. They use speech recognition to turn it into text and email it to you. That way when you’re driving down the road and remember something you’re supposed to be doing, you can just call yourself and the todo item will be waiting in your email inbox. I haven’t really used it seriously yet, but I’ll keep you posted.
posts feed