For the longest time, I managed my things-to-do with a sticky-pad piece of paper that I kept in my wallet.  On this paper, I’d write in tiny script all the things that I needed to take care of or remember.  As I finished items, I’d just scratch them off.  At the office, I’d use Outlook, of course, and got fairly proficient at using the “Task” feature fairly effectively.  However, both of these systems suffered from a lack of flexibility and mobility.  For the longest time, I realized I needed something better to manage tasks and ideas.  Basically, I needed a way to capture ideas easily and quickly at any location.  For the longest time, I considered getting an iPhone.  Finally, with the help of a friend in Hong Kong, a colleague and I decided to bit the bullet and do it.  I wanted to buy in Hong Kong because there you can buy the unlocked iPhone and therefore don’t have to sign the nonsense two-year agreement.  So, whenever I arrive in the US, I can just pop in my T-Mobile card and I have instant access.  The same also goes for any country in Asia.

The iPhone is not the be-all-end-all device that constitutes my “new system”, but I credit it for really opening my eyes to the power of “mobile computing”.  I’ve had my iPhone for about four months now and I’ll never go back to a bulky system like Outlook and Office.  No way.  I can still remember coming back to the office after Christmas and Chinese New Year and thinking that Outlook felt like a large anchor around my neck.  This is one reason why I worry a bit about Microsoft’s future.  Much of the company’s revenue comes from cash cows like Windows and Office.  But, both of these businesses face huge dangerous flaming arrows from the likes of Apple, Linux, and a myriad of cloud computing companies that I’ve embraced because their product is simply better.

But, even before purchasing the iPhone, I started playing around with a couple of web applications:  iGoogle and Evernote, both of which I am very impressed with.  Evernote is a free fantastic note-taking application that leverages great search technology instead of organization.  So, I don’t worry about where I should put my notes, I just create them and Evernote indexes them, searching for keywords (even keywords within images!) so that when I later search for a note, it’s easy to find the notes I’m looking for.  The application is great because it’s designed to work on the internet.  There’s a browser plug-in which makes it easy to take notes while surfing the web.  See the video demo on the Evernote homepage for more.  iGoogle is great for pulling together a few simple Google web components into a single page that I can view without even scrolling:

(above) My own iGoogle page (I’ve chosen random themes!). Google Reader is the first Google application that I latched onto. It works great at aggregating the various blogs that I like to read. The Google translator is great for chatting in Chinese. When I don’t understand some of the characters (which is most of the time), I can just plug them in here and get a quick translation.  Of course, now that I don’t have to use Outlook, Google Calendar is a natural choice.  Features are still being added, and sync support for the iPhone was recently added.  I haven’t adopted this yet.

You can see another web app that I like to use:  Remember the Milk.  This a cute little app that is a very good note taking system, much better than my pitiful little wallet sticky note.  With Remember the Milk, I can create notes for on any date and write a note to remind myself.  I can also categorize and prioritize them which makes working on a family of tasks easy.

I’m also experimenting with my own personal Joomla! site, hosted on my personal web space.  Joomla! is a general purpose CMS system.  I’m using it an super note-taker.  Something where I want a little more organization than Evernote.  So, I have various project ideas and progress listed there.  I also use it as a place to organize jobs that I outsource to various people in China, or anyone really when I’m not using Elance.  For example, I had a word-processing job that I outsourced to a contact in China.  I created a video using the great Windows Media 9 encoder of my desktop where I walked through the steps that I wanted done for hundreds and hundreds of pages of material.  I then created an account for the person that was working on this job, then, uploaded the movie and the files needed.  It was easy for her to log on, understand visually what needed to be done.  It worked great.  This site would be perfect for this sort of job, but I really need job level access for each account I create.  Instead, site access is at privilege level, and there are only like three levels!  Not sure how I’ll manage this, but that will eventually be a deal-breaker.

The iPhone is what ties most of this all together.  There are Evernote and Remember the Milk applications for the iPhone, both of which work beautifully.  Unfortunately, Remember the Milk costs $25, but it’s certainly worth that.  The Evernote application adds audio recording support, so if I’m in a big hurry, I can create a quick idea or task note with my voice on the iPhone and it will upload in the background to the web.  That’s the beauty of all of this: it syncs easily with the cloud (the web) and is therefore accessible from any computer.  The concept is so simple!  I can still hear the whines of my MS colleagues, “Man, I can’t get Outlook to sync with my iPhone.”  I tell them, “Your problem:  OUTLOOK!”  Time to modernize!  However, the various Google applications still aren’t represented very well on the iPhone, but they’ve got the cloud-computing idea down and, of course, they work great on the browser.  I have no good Joomla! access on the iPhone, except for the browser, and that’s not good enough yet.

So, this new system is a work-in-progress, but the results so far are promising.