don’t forget!

I have found my new favorite onsite tool. It’s called Jott, and it’s a web resource meant to help you remember everything you need to remember, when you need to remember it.

The premise is… you’re at the grocery store and you see the display of spray starch. That triggers you to think about the shirt you need to pick up at the dry cleaners tomorrow. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day, though, so how will you ever remember to go to the cleaners? You call Jott, leave yourself a message, and the fine folks at Jott transcribe the phone call into a reminder. If you state the date and time you want it done, it will even remind you at that specific time. So, at 5:15 the next day as you’re getting in the car to head home for the day (haha, yeah right), your phone beeps with a new text message saying “Remember to pick up the dry cleaning on your way home!”, and you DO remember!

So, how does this translate into being my favorite new onsite tool (because, yes, I did mean onsite, not online)? Well, imagine this scenario:

You’re running down the hall at a conference, putting out the proverbial fire, when someone stops you to ask you to email them some important information when you’re done with “whatever you’re doing”. You don’t have time to write anything down. Call Jott as you’re running and tell yourself to send that email in 10 minutes, or 15 minutes, or whenever you think you’ll be done with your original task.

Jott will email or text you (you can tell it what you want it to do), and as you’re finishing up with the first fire, you will get a reminder to send the email to your colleague. It’s brilliant! No more forgotten requests, no more stress about forgetting something.

The super-cool thing about Jott is that it interfaces with Remember the Milk (RTM), another online tool that I’ve written about before. Jott adds a phone-in or text-in way to input things into your to-do list, which RTM doesn’t have on its own.

So, you can use Jott all by itself, or you can use it with RTM - you can even use it with other popular online organization tools. Jott calls them “links”. In any case, you’ll be more able to do your job when your job needs doing with these tools.

Jott is a free service, and is available at www.jott.com.

Click on “Comments” below to share your favorite onsite tool!