I think I found the perfect combination of Jott and Vitalist for my use. I signed up for a Jott account soon after watching Robert Scoble interview the developers on his show a while back. Lately, I’ve been increasing my use of Jott because I have to walk from office to office around the Capitol. Sometimes, I’m in a hurry and need to focus on walking faster instead of shuffling along entering a reminder on my phone. There was a tradeoff.
When I call in a Jott, I can walk faster because I don’t have to focus on the itty-bitty keys on my phone. I just walk and talk. The drawback is that I can’t read my Jotts on my phone. I have to wait for the Jott to come into email. Even then, I have to check both Vitalist and email to figure out what I’ve got to do. Then, I have to transfer my Jott entries into Vitalist manually.Very time consuming.
On the other hand, if I enter stuff straight into Vitalist, I have to walk slowly and be careful not to bump into people while typing. Vitalist has a feature that allows you to email an entry into your inbox. The drawback to this is that it’s the same as typing it into the Vitalist Mobile site. There is no significant difference. I’d still walk slowly while typing. Still time consuming.
The light bulb turned on a while ago. What if I could have Jott send the transcriptions to my Vitalist automatically? I logged into Jott and added Vitalist as a message recipient. I tested it out a while ago and it worked! I can call in a reminder to Jott, where my recording is transcribed. Then Jott sends an email with the note to Vitalist, where it shows up in the inbox. It’s perfect! Well, maybe not. Jott doesn’t transcribe 100%. Sometimes there are misspellings or completely different words than you intended. The good news is that it’s correctable, which is much faster to do than to have to manually enter every single item. These two services combined should be included in your arsenal for Getting Things Done.
Update
One thing that I wished I could have from Jott was a non toll-free number to call. This way, I could put Jott on my phones myFaves list. T-Mobile myFaves does not let you add toll-free numbers, so all calls I made to Jott were eating up whole minutes for 15 second calls. I posted the request in the Jott forum and got a response with the Jott number. You can call 347-523-8843 on your mobile if you have a friends list or myFaves that lets you make unlimited free calling. This way, you save Jott money on long-distance charges and you save your minutes.
