I was in the middle of writing up the results of my latest productivity experiment last night when I received an email from the folks over at Jott.com telling me about a new feature they are adding.  If you read one of my recent posts about Jott, you’ll know that I think the ability to have words I speak into my phone transcribed has a lot of potential to increase productivity (but in that experiment, it didn’t quite work out for me the way I had hoped).

The latest feature the folks over at Jott have added is the ability to call up Jott from my phone, speak a plain English message regarding an appointment I have coming up, and have it appear in my Google Calendar.   I honestly love this idea!  How brilliant is that?  I’m with someone and set up an appointment with them (perhaps it’s the dentist for my next 6 month cleaning?), all I have to do is pick up my phone and speak the new appointment into my phone and it appears in my calendar.  Genius!

The only bummer is, I don’t really like using Google Calendar.  My problem is that during the day job I use an older version of Outlook, and keeping a Google Calendar and Outlook synchronized is really time consuming.  I use my Outlook calendar to keep track of all my appointments for simplicity’s sake.  

However, I think with a little creativity, I can get this to work.  If I set up my Gmail to forward the invite to my other email automatically, it would show up in my Outlook Inbox similarly to if someone invited me to a regular meeting.  I would just have to accept it (and maybe tweak it a little, which I normally do anyway).  So I think this feature may still help me out and make it possible to work on the thing I am really passionate about…which is of course my day job with the big corporationmy iKollect.com micro-ISV!

Tags: iKollect.com, Jott, productivity