In what seems like a never ending quest to remind myself of important things to do I’ve set up yet another scheme. This one uses telephony service If By Phone. I subscribe to their Complete service for Carrboro Coworking. It gives the business a great call tree and voice mail with a call routing service. I use this to get calls sent from my business number to my cell phone. Its more advanced than Google Voice in many ways and isn’t free. This reminder call is another advantage of paying for it.
I set up a recurring reminder to call me every day at 10:30AM to play a recording. I recorded, with my phone, a list of important long range to-dos. This reminder isn’t for daily to-dos but big picture stuff that will take months to get done. The If By Phone service even called me and recorded my message to be used with this service. I need this type of to-do because I have so many ideas that they often subvert each other. One day I’m down on idea A and another day I’m down on idea B. This has lead to a confusing and depressing feeling of mental limbo. I get stuff done but feel like I’m not going anywhere. So my answer is to learn focus by repetition.
The reminder can call any phone number you want. It’ll even ask you for confirmation you understood the message. You can type in your confirmation question. Mine is, “Do you dig it?”. I just say ‘Yes’ into the phone and the smart service understands then hangs up.
I’m trying this out because I don’t really like the sound of ringing phones. Its something I have a hard time ignoring. So I figured I would bug myself with it to force attention to important things. After a test call today I gave a name to the number in my cell phone address book. That way when I see the call coming in I’ll be ready to refocus my energies.
Brian C. Russell 