For the past couple weeks I’ve been playing around with a new service and I’m beginning to get addicted to it. I’ve got so many projects up in the air staying organized is a constant struggle. New ideas, new things for the to-do list, and new appointments are always popping up in my head and I don’t always have a pen and a piece of paper to write everything down. Before I’ve just had to try to remember whatever it was until I could locate something to write down my thoughts. Sometimes I remembered…sometimes I didn’t. That is until I ran across Jott.

Jott

Jott is a free service that allows you to use your cell phone to send reminders, to do’s, and messages to your email address. To use Jott, you sign up for a free account using your cell phone number and your email address. Once your account has been activated, anytime you want to send yourself a reminder you dial Jott’s toll-free number, speak your message and hang up! About 5 to 15 minutes later, your message will appear, in text, in your email inbox. If you want to listen to your message, click on the link in your email and you can listen to the actual message you sent.

When I told my husband about Jott, he asked, “Well how is that different from sending yourself a voice mail?” Here’s how it’s different. In your Jott account you can create a contact list of people you are in frequent contact with. Say for example you want to Jott a message to a specific person. If you had added that person as a contact in Jott, you call the toll-free number, speak that person’s name and the Jott message will be sent to that person’s email. You can also combine individual contacts into groups and send a Jott message to entire groups of people with a single phone call! Did I also mention that you can send Jott messages to cell phones as well as email addresses? My husband, an avid league tennis player is always on the phone coordinating groups of tennis players and he often has tell them all the same thing. This group ability is a great way for him to broadcast messages to every member of his team without the hassle of dialing a dozen numbers. If you have a blog and your blog allows you to add blog posts through email, you can also use Jott to send brief email posts. Just add the email address you use to post on your blog into your Jott contact list. Then call Jott and direct the message to your blog.

Of course Jott isn’t perfect. Because they use actual people to transcribe your Jott messages, you need to make sure that you speak clearly when sending your message so that they transcribe it accurately. And there can be mistakes in the actual transcription, especially if you speak too fast, don’t speak clearly, or if your cell reception is fuzzy. But the majority of the Jott messages I’ve been sending for the past few weeks or so have been pretty accurate…and when mistakes do appear, they are relatively minor.

Right now getting a Jott account is free…how long it will stay that way remains to be seen…I’m pretty sure that they’ll add some advertising or even make parts of the service for pay only sometime in the future. But if you want to check it out while it’s completely free…visit the Jott web site at www.jott.com and start Jotting!