It's Worth Noting

Some tips & tricks for fellow road warriors

If you're like me and spend time on the road traveling for business or pleasure, you're happy to find anything that makes the experience a little easier. This is especially true if you need to stay connected and take your technology along for the ride. I enjoy reading suggestions from other travelers and hope this brief list proves useful for you.   

• Checkpoint friendly laptop bag: I like the Checkpoint Flyer from Tom Bihn, but most laptop bag manufacturers make similar models. These bags let you get through airport security by laying your bag flat on the x-ray belt instead of taking your laptop out. In addition to being quicker and less frustrating, you're less likely to forget your laptop on the belt. Just saw someone do that last week.
• Organized Itinerary: If you're still carrying a paper folder full of reservations and maps or trying to keep them in one folder on your laptop/phone, an app like Worldmate can be very helpful (free and paid versions). You forward reservation emails to Worldmate and the app compiles it all into a trip timeline that is accessible online or on your phone. It captures map locations, phone numbers, etc. and providers you with alerts, weather forecasts and other information you request. You can also manually add items like office locations, etc. so it's all in one place.
• Taking notes: If you need to take some notes on the road, I recommend Evernote (free and paid versions). Works online, via an app on your laptop or on your blackberry or iphone. Let's you sync and record text, image or audio notes. Evernote makes it really easy to rely on your phone for note taking on the road without fretting over how you'll organize or share it all when you get back to the office.
• Power Adapter: An all in one AC/car laptop and usb power adapter is essential. I only bring this one power adapter with me since everything besides my laptop can be charged with a usb cable. The car charging option has come in handy many times and is essential for being able to charge your phone/gps, etc. while in the car without having to bring other power adapters. I use a model from Targus.
• Cables: I carry a single retractable usb cable with necessary tips to let me connect/charge everything I bring with me (via the power adapter above). I also carry a retractable VGA cable so I can hook-up my laptop to a TV in the hotel room (to play DVD or streamed movies) or a projector. The retractable cables are lightweight and don't get tangled up in my bag.
• Speakers: I carry a mini amplified speaker, which charges via USB, to plug into my laptop or phone to play music or movie audio.
• USB powered light: This is helpful if your laptop doesn't have a built-in light or lighted keyboard. Also helpful if you travel with your spouse and want to read at night in those hotels rooms with limited light options.
• Preparing for failure: I carry a keychain USB with copies of presentations, etc. in case my laptop goes crazy. I recommend that you or your IT person setup your laptop with recovery options and that you carry a BartPE recovery CD for system recovery on the road (remember your slim CDROM/DVD if your laptop doesn't have one built-in).

Hope this list is helpful. If you have additional tips & tricks, please share by commenting on this post. Thanks

A voice-to-email service that works

For years now, we've been promised processor chips and software that will handle voice-to-text recognition that will revolutionize how we use computers, cell phones, etc. As you well know, it hasn't happened. In the meantime, all I've wanted was an easy way to dial a number and have my speech turned into an email.

Jott has come to the rescue for this weary soul. Instead of continuing to beat their heads against the technology wall, they went around it and have delivered the service by utilizing an India based dictation service. Importing your contacts straight from Outlook, Google, etc. is easy. Recipients receive the translated text as well as a link to hear the audio file through their browser.

Give it a try and remember that your audio file goes to a dictation service, not a machine. This means you can spell words out or add punctuation by saying, "comma", etc.

www.jott.com

Voicemail to text service

There's one feature on the iphone that I find particularly appealing to my practical sensibilities: Visual Voicemail. I loathe calling into voicemail simply to sift through messages to divide them into three buckets: delete, try to remember and save. These buckets present three problems: (1) Deleting unwanted voicemails is annoying because I never wanted to deal with the message or caller in the first place; (2) My appetite for being able to remember details from important calls is larger than my memory's capacity; (3) Saved messages seem to get lost in an abyss that I only revisit once a month. For those who are tied to blackberry or palm devices, visual voicemail is a coveted feature. You know what would be even better though? Transcribed messages with audio files attached. SimulScribe has delivered just that to blackberry and palm users. In addition, if your corporate voicemail will forward audio files via email, you can have those messages transcribed too. All this for under $10/mo depending on the volume of messages you have subscribed. I've been using it for a while now and the service is very easy to setup and is reliable. I now blissfully receive text voicemail both to my blackberry and email inbox. Messages can be easily managed (deleted, forwarded, etc) from the SimulScribe application that I installed on my blackberry or from their website.

Mapping your mind

Most people that are stronger at organization and execution are weaker at creative brainstorming, not necessarily because of an inherent lack of ingenuity, but because their focus shifts to organization and execution too early. We simply short-change ourselves and others during the critical brainstorming phase of a decision or project because we cannot stop thinking about how to organize the explosion of ideas or how to execute the ideas that rise to the top.

If this sounds like you, I've got a suggestion, one that I've found helpful many times over. Mind mapping software is a helpful tool that sits at the intersection of ideas and the organization of them. The weakness of most of the mapping software I've found is that it does a poor job of appealing to the people who would benefit from it the most. The average package does a great job of helping you get your ideas onto paper and to organize them. Where it fails miserably is that it does little to help you execute. The map becomes a static reference point at best, leaving you to translate from the map into other software or processes to actually bring the ideas or decisions to life. For those of us who are organization and execution minded, the software's inadequacies in the execution phase make its value in the brainstorming and organization phases less appealing.

Mindjet comes to the rescue here by excelling all the way through the process from brainstorming to organization and execution. Mindjet has remarkable integration with the Microsoft Office suite and services like SharePoint. You can integrate appointments, tasks, documents, links, etc. so that you're hard work during the brainstorming and organization phases generates productivity gains. With Mindjet you can easily revisit your ideas and decisions, reorganize them on the fly and track execution from a working document that can be shared with your whole team. Enjoy.

30 day trial is available for MindJet

FreeMind is, as the name implies, a free alternative.