One of the most important things to do when you’re trying to be productive is to have an effective and efficient system in place to capture all the ideas you have and actions you need accomplish. David Allen talks about this in his book Getting Things Done, which I’m in the early chapters of reading. For a long time I used my Palm device to do this, but it was limited. If I was driving it was difficult and unsafe to use it and I’ve never been a fan of the note-taking capabilities of the Palm OS or its task management.

In the past year I’ve started using Jott.com. It’s a service that allows you to call their number and it will record what you say, transcribe it for you, and then post it in one of a number of different places. For me, this has been an incredible help. I use it multiple times per week to add things to my task list, capture ideas that come to me, or to set a reminder about something that I need to do later.

The reminders are one of the best features of the service. You call in, say “reminder” and it asks when you want the reminder and a note to attach to it. When that time comes around the service will send you a text message with the brief note.

I’ve found the service to be fairly accurate at transcribing what I say, but not 100%. It doesn’t really bother me that it’s not perfect mainly because it’s a FREE SERVICE!!! You definitely get more than you pay for with Jott. I’d suggest trying it out and if you have any thoughts about it let me know in the comments.

See also: How to Get Things Done with Jott.