You know what I’m talking about: you get a great idea; you start looking around for paper, but there’s none in sight–no trash container, not even a stray cocktail napkin. And you don’t have a pencil or pen anyway, so you’re stuck with memory. In my case, that means…game over.
What to do, what to do….
My clunky solution has always been to call home and leave myself a message. The problem is, I risk freaking out my wife when she happens upon this weirdly accented line of dialogue lurking among the messages; or else one of my kids zaps it, assuming it’s some oddball telemarketing ploy. And even if it gets through safely, there’s still the tedious step of transcribing it–drudgery that makes me want to do anything else.
My daughters have the obvious solution: “Simple, Dad–carry a notebook in your pocket, duh?”
And you would think that’s obvious enough. Unfortunately my left brain is so unkempt that to submit even to that miniscule amount of self-discipline is a doomed prospect for me. I need systems.
I know it’s a fatuous to think so, but it almost seems as though Jott.com was designed with information slobs, and me in particular. Here’s how it works:
When inspiration strikes, punch one of the speed dial buttons on your cellphone. It calls an 800 number– you’ve set this up when you registered–and you hear: “Who do you want to jot?” You reply, “Me.” Then you hear a beep. Start talking and jott will listen and record as long as you dictate (I’ve yet to discover if there’s an upper time limit to any given “jott”). When you’re finished, Jott sends you an email containing an .mp3 of whatever you said.
But here’s the cool part–your words appear as the body of your email, transcribed. Wow.
Jott has other features: you can jott another person by entering their cellphone number; you can make your jott a calendar entry by adding a date and time. But these are for your everyday business. It’s the other part that writers will benefit from–the ability, in effect, to dictate, transcribe, and file the most random notes, anytime, anywhere, using nothing but the cellphone in your pocket.
