One of the big pluses of having an Apple iPhone is that it helps you stay organized. A lot more organized.The problem is, many iPhone owners I’ve seen don’t use enough apps or features in the iPhone to help them stay organized.In this article, we’ll look at how we can utilize the iPhone to the max Stay Organized With Your iPhone
Stay Organized With Your iPhone
1. Overview
So before we start on how to use the iPhone to stay organized, I’ll just run through some general habits that I feel are important for staying organized.
One of the most important tricks I have up my sleeve to stay organized is to make a note, immediately whenever an idea or task pops into my head. Anything in this world that requires an action from you should be recorded somewhere. Immediately.Always make a note of any idea or task that pops into your head
The second important trick is to use your lists and tools consistently. If you make a list or write down notes but never check back against them on a daily basis, you’re wasting your time. Make sure you check your notes each day when you have some quiet time to plan out when your actions should be done.
Make it easy to note down and retrieve information. If it’s difficult to add a note or save information, you’ll tend to put it off sometimes. The same thing goes with retrieving the info. So always make sure you can find your notes fast and easy, otherwise it won’t work.
Ok, with those important tips on staying organized out of the way, let’s look at how some Apple iPhone tools can help you in staying organized. These tools all align to the three “organization principles” I’ve spelt out above – record stuff immediately, use the tools consistently and make it easy to note / retrieve information.
2. The iPhone Note App
The first iPhone tool we’ll look at is the default iPhone Note app. Make no mistake, this is a great note taking tool. I find myself recording all sorts of ideas into this neat app while I’m on the train, bus or airplane – anywhere.
And what’s nice is that you can search for text using the fantastic Spotlight Search. So if you have a note taken that has the word “Amazing Bubble” in the text, doing a Spotlight Search on “Amazing Bubble” will locate that exact note for you. You’ll be able to tap on it and go directly into the note you took.
3. Stay Organized With Your iPhone with Evernote
The other tool that is good for organization on the iPhone is Evernote. This is quite a popular tool which you can use to create new notes using desktop, web, and mobile versions of Evernote. What’s nice about it is that you can snapshot images of stuff you want to remember using your camera phone or webcam.
Evernote can recognize the text in the image when you do a search. It’s particularly useful for scanning things like receipts, recipes, tags, brochures and the like. It can also be downloaded into the Apple iPhone as an app which synches up with your Evernote content.
4. Stay Organized With Your iPhone with Awesome Note
This is another note taking and To-do app that is wildly popular on the iPhone. You get very nice custom note themes which have interesting motifs and designs. You can also password protect your whole set of notes and categorize them into groups like Family, Personal, Work, etc. – something that the default Apple Notes app cannot do. Very good app but it costs about $3.99 the last time I checked – so it’s a bit expensive compared to some of the cheaper solutions out there.
5. Stay Organized With Your iPhone with Listmaker
Right, next up, we look at Listmaker, a general purpose list manager. Listmaker has a clean, minimalist feel that keeps it easy to use. Each entry in Listmaker contains only a title, a note, and a due date.
You can create multiple lists and even nested sublists – which means you can keep one list for your To Do items, another for your grocery list, and yet another for that checklist you use every time you pack for a business trip. It’s sold on the App Store for a $2.99 USD a pop.
6. Stay Organized With Your iPhone with ReQall
ReQall for the iPhone is a powerful list-making and reminder-creating suite. You can combine your to-do lists, shopping lists, and voice memos, and then sync them to your online ReQall account.
This ReQall account can be accessed them from outside your iPhone. One interesting feature is that the service will even convert your voice notes to written ones.
ReQall is also great for groups or work situations. If your coworkers sign up for the free service; a People tab will let you share your entries with selected contacts.
There’s also a powerful alert to remind you of items on your to-do lists – through integrated functionality with instant-messaging clients, Firefox, text messaging, and e-mail.
Some folks won’t like ReQall because it is a little “fat” in terms of footprint. Its suite of features might be overkill for someone looking for a bare bones organization tool. If you’re such a person, then look to apps like Awesome Note or ListMaker instead.
7. Stay Organized With Your iPhone with Action Lists
Action Lists is a task manager based on the Getting Things Done® (GTD) system created by David Allen. If you like this GTD system (I use part of it to stay organized on a daily basis), then Action Lists is the perfect iPhone app to help you stay organized.
Action Lists allows you to quickly capture tasks and place them in your Inbox for later processing. According to GTD speak, after processing, a task can be tagged as a “next action” that you are committed to complete, an item for your Someday list that you may (or may not) get around to in the future, or an item for your Waiting list which contains items that cannot be completed until someone else takes action.
Your next actions can also be easily assigned a context (a category like “errands”, “phone calls” or “email”), and you can also grouped then into projects. All these functions are accessible through your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Conclusion:-I hope this article has given you some good ideas on how to stay organized with your Apple iPhone. Remember three key “organization principles” I’ve mentioned – record stuff immediately, use the tools consistently and make it easy to note / retrieve information. If you combine apply these principles using one of the apps I’ve discussed, then I’m sure you’ll be on your way to a much more organized life! Good luck and until next time, here’s to some happy tinkering with your iPhone!