7 Ways to Text Message for Productivity
August 27th, 2007 (8:00am) Anne Zelenka 14 CommentsTweet This
Text messaging (also known as short message service or SMS) is growing in popularity, and not just with teenagers. Of course you can use it to keep in touch with people; that’s getting easier and cheaper all the time with offerings like Yahoo’s latest integration of texting into email.
But did you know you can also use it to stay productive on the go? Warm up your thumb and see what you can do with just a few 160-character messages.
Get quick shots of information. You can get weather reports, locations of nearby wifi hotspots, stock quotes, directions, and more. Services like 4INFO and Google Mobile’s SMS search make it easy. For example, text “wifi 80222″ to 4INFO (44636) for hotspots in zip code 80222 or “flight UAL 696″ to GOOGLE (466453) for United 696 flight status.
Add an item to your to do list or calendar. Set up a to do list on Gubb and you can add items by SMS. Add events to 30Boxes or Google Calendar by just texting the details.
Check your daily agenda. Google Calendar makes it easy to find out what’s on your schedule. Text “next” to GVENT (48368) to get your next appointment, “day” to get that day’s agenda, or “nday” to get tomorrow’s agenda.
Remind yourself. Calendars like GCal and 30Boxes will send you text message reminders of upcoming events. Remember the Milk to do lists will remind you by SMS to. You can also use a dedicated reminder service like PingMe (here’s our review).
Read your voice mail. Get the gist of a voicemail message by SMS, with CallWave’s Vtxt service, free while it’s in beta. You won’t get an exact transcription — less important comments like “hello” and “ummmm” will be left out — but that keeps the message down to about the size of a text message.
Get email by text message. All the carriers offer email gateways to SMS. Figure out what yours is and you can forward selected email to your phone. If you want to get certain urgent emails, you can tell the senders to put a code word into the subject and use a filter to send only those messages to SMS.
Arrange a meetup. Use Dodgeball or Twitter to tell colleagues and friends when and where to get together. Great for when you’re at a conference and don’t know who might be looking to grab lunch or a drink.
Related posts from the GigaNet:
- All Hail the SMS [GigaOM]
- 5 Ways to SMS for Free [GigaOM]
- Have Skype SMS your Voicemail Text [GigaOM]
- Group SMS for Mobile Social Networking [Web Worker Daily]
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
One more to note is a service call Mosio. It’s basically a mobile community enabling users to text any question from their phone and have it answered by other members (they call it “people powered mobile search), kinda like a Yahoo! Answers for Mobile, obviously with a faster turn around time, so the questions range from fact checking to directions to calls for opinion on what users should eat for dinner that night.
The service is pretty new and requires registration, but seems to be getting some attention.
http://www.mosio.com
I’ve found it very useful to keep an archive of the text messages I’ve sent and received. Its much quicker to search for text messages in Outlook then on the phone. I use MobileArchiver to archive the text messages to Outlook.
I wrote SMS Productivity post in my blog: http://www.fernando-alvarez.com.ar/blog/2009/03/bromas-para-enviar-por-sms/