Another service that you may like

Isn’t it funny how there seems to be a company falling over themselves to help you do anything these days?

Imagine a service that wants to help you manage tasks just by thinking about them and then they appear on a website for you to arrange and edit. We are almost there but Jott.com lets you call their toll free number and you just speak up to 15 seconds and they save it, transcribe it, email it (with the text at the subject line), and you can view and arrange new “jotts” on their site after logging in.

It is set up in true GTD fashion,  with new jotts going to the inbox, and you can sort them, set an alert to be sent by email or SMS, and process that inbox.

So if a to do pops into your head, just call jott, record the items one after another. Great for people on the road and away from a computer. No more notes that you lose.

YouMail is a worthy addition to your cell phone.

YouMail is the bomb! I just heard about this service by listening to an interview with one of their top guys on Off the Hook. Those guys are old school hackers and they ask tough questions.

The service looks great and I can’t imagine why you would not want this. It’s free, you can have a different greeting for any number you choose, you can save a voicemail for life, you can have them delivered via email. You can listen to them via their website.

I signed on and was set up in 5 minutes. You can record a greeting and upload it to them. Very cool.

Accounting for time

With so many different tasks at work, one of my goals is to have a good accounting of my time so that I have a good answer for the question “What took so long?” or “What did you do today?”

Half of yesterday and all of today I used a tool, SlimTimer to track my day. I was trying to use notepad and just log my day but it is kind of a waste of time to be typing things when you should be working :)

I have a few tasks on there and my whole day the clock is ticking. I just adjust which task is running. I have known about this tool for a long time but now it is the time it made sense to use.

Yeah, books!

I got two books in the mail today from Amazon, Getting Things Done and Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL

I have wanted the first for over a year and finally took the plunge. The second I have been wanting for a month based on a recommendation from my good friend Josh Clark. Our pastor Dean is just starting to go through GTD with the leadership group on Saturday mornings. Even though I cant go I still want to implement a complete system of GTD. I need it. I am excited to be able to free up more RAM in my conciseness and be able to process more in the moment. I think it will make me a better employee to focus on the now when I am at work instead of have all kinds of projects and desires to accomplish things haunt me all day. I discovered GTD from del.ico.us, and it has been my main scource for GTD info. Time to get real.

More on the PHP / MySQL book later :)

Also this came across my Google Reader yesterday and I was convicted. I have been guilty and I want to do all to not be a quiet thief. link

“He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster” (Prov. 18:9).

This passage illustrates well the nature of sins of omission. When someone vandalizes something, we can readily see that this is a species of mindless theft. The thief takes something away, but he does not take it away for himself–he just takes it away from everyone by destroying it. In a similar way, when an employee is slothful in his work, he is destroying his employer’s time. This is a form of stealing, and the fact that many workers don’t think of it this way does not lessen the destructiveness of what is happening. This passage says that work not done, which could and should have been done, is tantamount to destroying that same work if done by somebody else. Let us say that one employee is goofing off, arriving late, and wasting time in pointless conversation. Over time, this amounts to one widget not being made that otherwise would have been made. (This illustration is occurring in a widget factory.) This text says that such laziness is comparable (“brother to”) taking a widget that an industrious employee actually made, and destroying it. Laziness is simply quiet vandalism, quiet theft.

I don’t want to waste time, it just takes a very conscious effort to focus on the task at hand without seeing and doing another thing that needs to be done and yet distracts. I am working on it. With God’s grace I can overcome and be that employee that is worth $30 an hour whether I am being paid that or not.

Google Reader rocks

I am loving using Google Reader to stay up to date with RSS feeds and blogs and news. I am not subscribed to hundreds of feeds like some people (Scoble is so cool that I don’t need to link to him) but because of “Shared Items” I can read the cream of his rss feed. I also now have a shared list and I posted the feed on my sidebar.

The great part is that I am now a major news broadcaster.

The shortcuts are what makes it so easy, and the view that I use makes it feel like gmail. I like to choose the list view, all items, start at the top, skim the first entry, j (next item), skim, j, read (this looks interesting), Shift+S (share item), j, j, spacebar (scroll page for long entries), j, k (To go back, that last item cought my eye after I passed it), j, v (open original item in a new window), m (mark item as unread, Its too long and I want it to still be unread)

So sign up for google reader, get rid of any default feeds that might come with it, add my link blog, add scobles link blog, and try to keep up with the RSS Firehose, ride the river baby, the RSS River of News

PS

This post was inspired by SidebarGeek , and also ignore any simalarities between my link log and scobles, if you happen to see the same links its because I found them interesting enough to share with my friends, Scoble and I have diferent friends but he got to pass his picks along. Its like The Wave, get it going and soon you just convinced 10,000 people to stand up and have their hands in the air :)

Taken from the moleskine website

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”
— William Stafford

I am adding this to my wishlist, Large Squared Journal but I am currently using the Cahier Pocket Squared Notebook for capture, with me at all times and a modified hipster PDA.