Making the most of NOTES in Nokia

You may not think much of it, but the NOTES application in most nokia phones is worthy of keeping as a shortcut key on your phone. You can make different notes for various lists. I came across a webpage which talked about 12 lists that will help you get things done. Here they are and you can consider opening a note file for each and keep it handy on your phone. One list I keep is a "places to go" which is useful when you are stuck for ideas and you've forgotten the restaurants that you have been meaning to go to, or you can't think of a place where you can get a good steak. 

1. Task lists: Naturally, the most obvious is the task list, a simple list of things you have to do. A running list of the tasks you have to get done can make your life significantly easier, provided you use it religiously. For more information about task lists, check out my “Back to Basics” post from last year.
2. Project planning: Creating a list of tasks associated with a projects can be a great way to wrap your head around the project, as well as a prompt for what to do next when you finish a task. And a list of projects will help you make sure you’re keeping up with all your commitments.
3. Wish lists: A wishlist is a list of things you want to buy but don’t need right away. For example, I want a new electric guitar, but I’m not going to run out and buy one. When you have the money, or the time, you can take out your list and see what you want most of all.
4. Grocery/shopping lists: One of my most effective lists is a simple one-page list I made of all the groceries I regularly bought, arranged in the order I’d find them at my local store, with a few blank spaces every so often for one-off additions. Every week, I’d print it off, cross off anything I didn’t need, and add anything that wasn’t on the list, and go shopping.
5. Gift ideas: Nothing’s worse than the approach of Christmas with no idea of what to get someone close to you. Keep a list of odd, attractive, or just-right-for-you-know-who items throughout the year to help make Christmas, birthday, and anniversary shopping less stressful.
6. Checklists: Any recurrent multi-step tasks – like packing for a business trip, arranging a presentation, or winterizing your home – can be done more easily and with fewer errors if you write up a simple checklist of all the steps involved and equipment needed.
7. Reading journal: A while back I suggested that students (and other readers) keep areading journal. Basically, this is a list of books you’ve read with notes and adequate information to recall the text later.
8. Links and logins: In these days of proliferating web applications, almost everyone has dozens, if not hundreds, of websites they need to log into on a regular basis. Keeping a list of all these sites and your login info can be a lifesaver! Also, if you keep a list online, you can have active links to each application, making a pretty useful start page.
9. Life lists: A list of your short- and long-term goals can be a great motivator, as well as a trigger list to help generate new projects. I also like to have a list of areas of focus, the different roles that I play, each of which comes with a different set of tasks and goals.
10. Reference: Any information you find yourself referring to often can make a useful list – metric conversions, file types, software registration keys, birthdays, the names of your children, whatever.
11. Logs: Broadly speaking, a log is a list of events tied to specific dates/times. Keeping a list of your exercise achievements, food consumption, words written, or other set of data appropriate for your projects will help you measure your progress as well as identify problems (like if your output drops on certain days of the week or month, or you seem to crave certain foods on certain days).
12. Daily summaries: A one- or two-line summary of the day’s events can help to remind you of problems that arose as well as how you dealt with them, as well as track behavioral patterns that might point to illness, conflict with certain people, or other issues.

Nokia revolutions... Cityman to Nokia N97

Recently, Nokia sent me what they call the Nokia N97 anti-theft device. In fact its just a replica of the Nokia Cityman, which was the first hand-held mobile phone that Nokia came out with in 1987. This giant Cityman replica came with a housing to put the Nokia N97, to show the size comparison with a phone 12 years older.

Thanks to Nokia for the laughs but I think I will stick with the E series :)

(photos coming soon)

Best Profiles giveaway @ MyE63

Just to let you all know that we are giving away Best Profiles, a program that also works on the Nokia E65. Go to the Nokia E63 blog to enter by promoting or contributing to the blog.

Nokia PC Suite Calendar - the hidden gem for GTD

Are you an organising freak? Love getting things done efficiently? Nokia Calendar is your friend. Much of the action has recently been on MyE63 but today, we'd like to look at the Calendar for Nokia PC Suite. In one word, it's awesome! The recent update to Nokia PC suite was already mentioned here but we didn't do justice to the features of the in built Calendar.

The Calendar now looks like Microsoft Outlook's calendar which is a big step for Nokia. You can right click any day and add a new meeting, call or memo.

• Views - You can view the calendar in a monthly screen, weekly screen or a day overview screen. Just like Google Calendar, they also have an Agenda view (called List view in Nokia Calendar) which allows you to see all your appointments line by line. This is especially useful to
• Duration Selection - If the appointment that you are adding runs for for a certain length, you can select the timeslots that the appointment will take up and press enter to add details of the meeting. eg In the 7 day view, select 4 timeslots in a row to create a meeting 2 hours long.
• Double-click to edit - To add or edit any entries, just double click the date or timeslot and the details screen will pop up for a new appointment.
• Immediate update to phone - As soon as you are finished with your update and you save the entry, it is now in your phone. Saves a lot of thumb work entering new meetings etc via PC suite.
• Sort calendar entries - In the list view you can also even sort calendar entries by appointment type, subject, location, description, start date, end date, alarm state, alarm time or even whether the entry recurs.

So what are we missing? One problem with the Nokia Calendar which stops it from replacing Outlook is that you cannot print the screen that you see. For example, you can't just print out the agenda for the next 10 days because there is no print option. You need to screen capture it and print it out that way... not sure why this was not built in but maybe in the next PC Suite build.