Jott and EverNote: Helping Me Keep Organized

You should know by now that I’m a big EverNote fan. I love how I’m able to grab just about anything and drop it into EverNote and then be able to refer back or use the data from any machine I’m working with including my Sprint (HTC) Mogul. Using EverNote in combination with another tool, Jott, is helping me to keep organized during this really hectic work period at the theatre.

Jott allows you to call in messages to the Jott service that are transcribed into text and then redirected to a number of different applications and services, or accessed from the Jott site. For example, you can choose to call in your Tweets to Twitter if you so desire, or use it to call Remember The Milk, a very popular to do list program. With some blogging platforms you could even create a blog entry by speaking the entry into your mobile device and sending it directly to your email. Jott’s voice transcription is very good, at least in my usage so far.

I’m using Jott with EverNote to store my thoughts and to do’s at the moment. Since I am frequently running around picking props up for the show, or items for the ongoing renovation, it makes for a great wayt to keep track of things. I’ll simply call Jott on my phone, tell it to call myself and list the items I am about to pick up. Within a few minutes the transcription is done by the Jott servers (I don’t think they have humans doing this) and then it is emailed to my EverNote account. When I make my stops, I open up EverNote mobile on my phone and have the list ready to go.

EverNote’s Windows platform allows you to merge notes (the Mac version may allow this, but I haven’t figured out if that is true or not yet) and this is also handy. With gas prices the way they are we are working very hard to minimize trips to and from the theatre these days. Let’s say throughout the day I’m preparing to make a run of errands for the next morning. I live in a town about 15 minutes away and we frequently do a lot of running to vendors there, so if we can consolidate and have me pick them up on the way to work the next morning we’ve saved a bit of gas. As we discover throughout the day that something needs to be picked up or purchased, I’ll simply call Jott with a reminder throughout the day. Before I go to bed at night as I’m doing my last email check, I’ll take a look at EverNote and merge any Jotts with items I need to pick up the following morning into one note. EverNote does the synchronizing for me and I’m all set.

This also comes in handy when I’m listening to a podcast while driving. I might here a program or service that sounds intriguing mentioned on the podcast and I’ll just call Jott, speak the name of the application or website, and when I have time to check it out later, I’ll have the info ready to access.

While Jott and EverNote don’t have a direct link at the moment the way some services do, you can easily do this through Jott’s email function. If you’re looking for a step by step guide to setting that up (it is really easy) LifeHacker published this one awhile back.