Several different ways to optimize and organize your life with Jott

There are plenty of tools available nowadays to plan your day, set reminders, and assign tasks. You have applications on your mobile phone, you have Basecamp, you have Outlook, you have iCal, and so on.

But what do you do when you’re driving down the highway, remember an extremely important task that needs to be done tomorrow, and ensure you don’t forget it? Jott it. (Disclaimer: YGG does not recommend you talk or use your cellphone while driving on the highway. :)

That’s Jott it, without the down. A verb that seems to be almost as catchy as “Google it�.

This online service was first announced back in December or so on TechCrunch. The idea is that you have a local or toll-free number you call from the phone associated with your Jott account, say who you’d like to send a Jott to (contacts), say your message, and it’s then transcribed and e-mailed to the contact you chose.

Jott is entirely free, but is still in “Public Beta” mode. They are expected to roll out of beta in the near future and offer a Business plan on top of the freebie, most likely with a few new features, no Jott advertising in the e-mail notifications, and an unlimited amount of messages.

Where and when could this be handy? On plenty of occasions, many of which I’ll try and cover today.

To start, head over to Jott

When you create a Jott account, you’ll be given a local number (US and Canada only) to call from the number you associated with your account – ideally your cell. Once you call and confirm your account, you can add that number to your speed or voice-activated dial. When you want to Jott a note, simply pull up and dial that number, it’ll automatically detect who’s calling, and Jott away!

Creating simple reminders for yourself

When a big idea hits you, having a copy of it later, just in case your 65 year-old memory in a 22 year-old body doesn’t hold up (raises hand), is imperative.

Within your Jott admin you can choose an e-mail address for yourself. When you call Jott, simply say “myself�, record your message, and a transcribed copy will be sent to your e-mail. That’s it.

Sending messages to multiple co-workers, family, or friends

There are many instances where you may need to send a Jott to several people. Instead of recording the same message 15 different times for each contact, you can create Groups in your Jott admin and associate contacts with that group.

Maybe you create one for your poker buddies. Name the group “Poker�, and add in Bill, Bob, and Benny (known as the Bees) as contacts in that group, all from your Jott admin. You’re tied up at the office making thousands of photocopies tonight and can’t make this evening’s match. So you dial your Jott number, say “Poker�, and make up a cool story about how you’re rock climbing right at this moment with Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and their babies!

Sending a Group message to it’s member’s e-mail addresses works like a charm. Having that message transcribed and sent to their cell phones via SMS or voice should as well, but many people, including myself, seem to be on a carrier that won’t work with Jott’s SMS feature. So you’ll have to give this a try and see how you make out. E-mail notifications are better than nothing, and should work for those of us that hang in the techie social circle.

Twittering without the typing

The 140 character Twitter limit may not seem like a staggering number, but if your cell doesn’t have a qwerty keyboard (ie. Blackberry or Treo), you’ll appreciate Jott’s voice-to-text over your mobile suggestively trying to finish your sentences.

You enable the Jott-to-Twitter feature in your admin and enter your account info there. When you call Jott and it asks you who you’d like to send a message to, say “Twitter�.

Unlike some of Jott’s other text based transcriptions, [Jott] is not added to the beginning of your Twitter messages, which is fantastic.

Having upped the quality of their transcriptions over the past few months, Jott is pretty damn accurate, and may actually help you maintain your Twittering habit.

Creating to-do’s in 37signal’s Highrise

I helped one of my client’s setup Highrise as their CRM a few month’s back, instead of using what they had been for the past 30 some years, pink pieces of paper. I’m glad to say they’ve been faithfully using it, along with Jott, since then.

If you’ve never heard of Highrise, it’s an online contact management app that allows you to add notes, assign tasks, forward and associate e-mails, with your company’s contacts. A handy app to keep track of everyone.

One thing that Highrise provides is a personal dropbox e-mail address (dropbox@1234567.highrisehq.com). By adding a prefix to that address, you can create a task in Highrise for Today, Tomorrow, This Week, and Next Week. You would add each of those four as contacts to your Jott account and give each of them an e-mail address like:

• task+today@1234567.highrisehq.com
• task+tomorrow@1234567.highrisehq.com
• task+thisweek@1234567.highrisehq.com
• task+nextweek@1234567.highrisehq.com

When you call Jott and are asked “who are you Jotting?�, say Tomorrow, for instance, and your recording will be converted to a task right in the sidebar of your Highrise for tomorrow.

Blogging via voice with Wordpress

Mobile blogging has been around for quite some time but really hasn’t taken off. Still, there may be times where you’re at an event or have just closed a deal and would like to share it with your readers.

Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it should be. They do have a Wordpress setup in the admin that you configure just like you would with Twitter. But it’s made for Wordpress.com hosted blogs, not your own custom installed Wordpress blog.

Even with that, I wasn’t able to get it to connect to a free Wordpress.com blog I was testing it with.

But there is a workaround. Wordpress allows you to blog-by-email. You create a unique e-mail address at your domain that nobody will ever guess, set it up in your Wordpress admin, and anytime you send an e-mail to that address, it’ll post to your blog.

A guide to setting this up and patching any issues that may arise are available here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_by_Email

To make this work with Jott, you’ll want to add that unique e-mail address you created as a contact in Jott. You can name it Blog or Wordpress, whatever you like. When you call and leave a message for that name, your message will be sent to that unique address. When Wordpress’ blog-by-email checks for any new posts, it should pick up that message and post it as a blog entry.

I’ve tested this, and got it to work to some extent, but there is plenty of room for improvement. If you have Wordpress 2.2 or higher, there is a patch you’ll need to use to make the blog-by-email feature work properly. You’ll find it at the Wordpress Codex link I posted above.

This feature would be golden if you could say the title of the post, then the content on Jott and have it convert to a post without any [Jott from Travis] message or any other info that interferes with your message. But it doesn’t look like we’re at that stage yet. Having a plugin for Wordpress would make Jott essential in every blogger’s arsenal.

Seeing Jott integrate with Tumblr, a popular brief blogging platform, could also be really be interesting. Any Jott staff that may eventually read this, make nice with Tumblr.

For all the desktop widget junkies

Jott has released a desktop app called Jott Express. Much like Twitterific, it’s quite the pretty application. But, and a big but, it’s built on Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR), which you’ll have to download to use Jott Express. Compared to a widget on your Mac or Yahoo Widget on your PC, Adobe’s platform kind of sucks. You can’t control the positioning, minimize to the notification area of your taskbar, and it’s pretty unstable in my opinion.

If you only need to use Jott Express a few times a day and not have it be a permanent widget on your desktop, you can get by. The app itself is an efficient way to send Jotts to yourself or your contacts without having to call in, or view and listen to your previous Jotts and manage everything.

So do you think I recommend Jott?

If you chose “yes”, you would be right. There’s still plenty of room for improvement and features, as there is for any and every application, but at it’s current stage, Jott is far and above good enough. If you use any of the methods I listed above for integrating Jott into your lifestyle, you should be a helluva lot more optimized and organized in no time, and have the urge to add an extra letter to the end of your name. So yes, Traviss loves Jott.

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