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Sandy, Jott, and OmniFocus: Helping me stay efficient and productive and on task
Back in December I blogged about the web site IWantSandy.com, which is a kind of electronic personal assistant that keeps track of anything you tell it in plain English. To quote myself:
For example, I can tell Sandy, “Remind me to stop at the grocery store today at 5pm.” And then at 4:45, you receive a reminder. But that’s just the beginning. While you can give Sandy instructions from the I Want Sandy site, you can also send her instructions via email or even through Twitter.
I wanted to update a little on how I’ve further adapted and expanded my use of the Web application to help me remember my to-do list and actually get things done. My mind is like a sieve sometimes and if I don’t record something important as soon as it occurs to me or is told to me, it’s almost guaranteed to drift off into the dark recesses of my brain almost immediately.
Thus, Sandy helps me to record everything. But what if I’m away from a computer? That’s where Jott comes in (which I’ve mentioned before in another context). Jott is a voice-recognition system that interfaces with the Internet. Once I’ve set up an account, I can call Jott’s phone number, 1-866-JOTT-123, and it will ask me who I want to “jott”. I can jott myself or or someone else I’ve entered in the system, or more relevant for this post, another Web service like… IWantSandy.com.
It goes like this:
- Jott: “Who do you want to Jott?”
- Me: “Sandy”
- Jott: “Sandy. Is this correct?”
- Me: “Yes”
- Jott: Beep
- Me: “Remind me to pickup milk at Shaw’s on the way home tonight at 5pm with tag todo and errand.”
Now Sandy records a to-do list item for me and emails the confirmation to my Mac. When my Mac picks up the email, I’ve setup a rule for it so that it recognizes Sandy’s emails and automatically places the to-do items in my task management software, OmniFocus. A few times per day I clean up the In-box of OmniFocus and, presto, I’m keeping track of to-do items and projects and tasks better than ever before.
And thanks to Sandy and Jott, I no longer have a huge gap in my task recording during the several hours a day I’m in my car. Now if only I could find a way to use Jott while I’m in the shower…
Update: Of course, I found an error in my Mail rule in the screenshot. The condition should be set to “all” not “any”. Carry on.
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COMMENTS
Um, I keep a “to do” list as a text file on my computer, which I edit with Microsoft Notepad. Suddenly I feel very low-tech. 
Posted by
on 02/28/08 at 03:38 AM That really works great for me too. Here’s something that you may find useful. A script to get Jott emails into Omnifocus just like Sandy.
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=7651
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