Capturing Thoughts Before They Are Gone

As you are probably well aware, capturing information before it is lost is a key to good time management: capture all of your ToDo’s and ideas as soon as you have them, put them in a trusted system, and process them later. This article is about a few ways to do the capturing.

Sometime back, Lance Gallup guest-authored an article here on using Jott to have a voice message from your phone transcribed into to text and emailed to you. A common use for this would be:

• You are driving around and have the thought “I need to set the trash out at home.”
• So, you use your cellphone to call the Jott service and leave a yourself a message to that effect
• The message is then transcribed and emailed to you
• You check your email when you get home and then see you need to set the trash out.

It has tons of practical uses. I followed that article up with an article on VoiceMinder, which is a neat application that just records a message on your Windows Mobile Smartphone and emails the recording directly to you, eliminating the “middleman” so to speak (although you have to listen to the recording instead of quickly reading a transcription).

I mention these two previous posts because there is some really good update information to go along with them. Specifically:

• There is a great writeup at StudentLinc on Using Jott and GMail for a ToDo list. This is really neat, because it shows that you can use GMail for your ToDo list and you can feed it using Jott.
• Thomas R. Hall mentioned that SimulScribe accomplishes much the same thing as using Jott would do, but uses computers to do the transcription service instead of humans. This eliminates the concern that some people have with Jott: the transcribers get to hear your items. (SimulScribe does require a small fee, though.) Thomas mentioned this in a previous comment on this blog.
• Thomas also recently mentioned SimulSays on jkOnTheRun, noting that it “will let you get messages in a visual voicemail format directly to your BlackBerry without having to receive it first via email.” SimulSays is a BlackBerry-only application, but I know a lot of you have a BlackBerry and may want to try this out. It is free, by the way.

And, if you are one who seldom goes anywhere without something to write on (like I do), that can work well for capturing thoughts, too. I use 3×5 cards a lot for that, and there are some small, pocket-sized Moleskine notebooks that are great for capturing thoughts, too.

Of course it can be hard to jott an idea on a 3×5 card if it occurs to you while you are driving around, but the above tricks work nicely for using your cellphone to capture the idea/ToDo. You can of course use both types of tricks. Regardless, as David Allen reminds us, you eventually have to dump both sets of information into your inbox to process it.