They will find you... if you want them to.

Most people have a home phone, work phone and at least one cell phone. Wouldn't it be nice to give your family, friends and co-workers one number to get in touch with you. Now you can and it's a great free (at least while they are still in beta) service called GrandCentral.  

GrandCentral provides you with a local number that you can give everyone to contact you. It allows you to tie all of your phones to that one number so when a person calls your GrandCentral number you can have one or all of your phones ring depending on how you configure your setup. The setup allows you to add your contacts and classify them into different groups. You can then specify which phones ring when a person calls from a particular group. For example, you add your mom to your contacts and classify her into the Family group. In your settings you setup your Family group to ring your cell and home phone (not your work phone). So the next time mom calls your new GrandCentral number both your cell phone and your home phone will ring and the call will be routed to the phone that answers first.

In addition, there are many other nice features that GrandCentral offers like call screening, voicemail notification and call switch.

• Call screening will either read the name from your address book if the caller already in there or GrandCentral can ask for the callers name if he or she is a first time caller.
• Voicemail notifications can be sent to you via email, SMS or both. A link is provided in your email to listen to the message.
• Call switch allows you to switch between phones while you are on a call. For example, if you are talking on your work phone and would like to leave the office, you can press the star key (*) and your other phones will ring. Simple answer on your cell phone and hang up your work phone.

GrandCentral is a great service that can really help bring back some simplicity to our complicated (ala multi-phones) lives. Moreover, I believe that it is going to be a service that will continue to grow and mature. I believe that this is especially true since the two-guy startup was recently acquired by Google therefore you know that it has a good seal of approval.

Productivity from anywhere

Lately, I've been working on implementing David Allen's "Getting Things Done (GTD)" methodology and so I've been trying out different tools and services that are available on the web.

First off, I needed to find the perfect to-do list service that is easy to access both from my PC and phone's web browser. I explored three services that seemed to fit my needs - Vitalist, 30Boxes and Remember The Milk.

Vitalist - This is the closest one that I found that really mirrors the GTD workflow. It let's you create projects, easily add tasks and create your own context tags. I really can't say anything bad about Vitalist. It is easy to rearrange your lists and very easy to filter by tag, project, date, etc. They also offer a mobile version so that you can access your list from your phone or PDA browsers.

30Boxes - This is a great site that integrates both a calendar and a to-do list. The to-do list is much simpler compared to the other two services, but it is effective. You can add multiple tasks and create your own custom tags. However, that is about the extent of what you can do with their to-do list. The only way that you create a project is by adding a custom tag for each project. They also offer a mobile version so that you can access them from a mobile device. I believe the only downside to 30Boxes is the lack of the ability to create projects and they had some issues with up time when I tried them.

Remember The Milk (RTM)- These guys are gaining popularity each day. They have really tried to integrate into the Google products like Google Calendar and GMail. The thing that really sets them apart from the other two is their ability to be accessed offline either through synchronization with a PDA (requires an upgrade to the Pro version for $25/year) or by using Google Gears. Google Gears allows you to use your web application offline by allowing you to save your data locally and then lets you synchronize your changes once you are back online. This is great for anyone that travels and doesn't have access to the net. In addition to the ability to create custom tags, RTM lets you create custom searches that you can save into separate tabs. This allows you to easily group common tasks together. They also have keyboard shortcuts to enable quick entry and editing. I am currently using RTM as my main source of all of my to-dos.

The last service that I would like to share with you that works with all three of the above to-do list services is called Jott. Jott allows you to dial a toll-free number, dictate a message and have that message transcribed and forwarded via an email to the recipient that you specify. For example, if I dial the service and it asks me "Who would you like to Jott?" and I say "Me". The voice responds with "Jott to self... beep". I say "You need to start working on your blog!!!". The voice then says "Got it." Then that message gets transcribed and it shows up in my email inbox. The great thing about this service is that you can setup individual recipients, groups or services that take email as an input to their service. These service not only include the above three to-do lists, but also include ones like twitter, various blogs, Google Calendar and many more. The only downside is that you can only leave a 30 second message but that is plenty to get you going.

If you look at the picture above, that is my current configuration. I'll be driving home and I'll remember that I need to do something. I'll dial Jott (on my speed-dial) and leave a message for RTM. When I get home or when I'm back to the office, I review my Inbox and fill out the details of the task and park it in its appropriate category. It can't get much easier!