One Saturday morning in March, I found myself in a hotel room in Birmingham, Alabama. I had an hour to kill while my wife was at a conference, so I brainstormed one-and-a-half dozen blog post ideas and did a lightning-quick but thorough mind-sweep to create a new projects list from scratch.

I did a lot in that one hour.

It made me consider two things: 1) the limited time I had forced me to work quickly. 2) The different environment forced me to focus.

I’d wager that my output was probably due to the time crunch since I had a lot to do and a short time to do it. I blocked out any distractions there were — especially once I turned off the remodeling show on HGTV. But the unique environment made me consider whether it was a factor in my increased productivity. It was a hotel room — a rather nice one at that, in a historic building in Birmingham — but it was free of familiar distraction I have at home or at work. The only things familiar were the clothes in my suitcase.

So I began to wonder how digital nomads to it — how do they stay productive when the environment constantly changes? I wonder if I’d be distracted by the ever-changing scenery, or if that constant change would force me to be disciplined. Chris Brogan likes working in coffee shops and bookstores. They inspire him.

If you’re a nomad, digital or not (in my case I was working entirely with paper, as I didn’t have a laptop), how do you do it? Does the ever-changing environment distract you? Or does it help you be productive? I’m curious to know.

As a recent convert over to the Android side of mobile phone operating systems, I’ve been looking for a great way to capture notes on go, on or off line, and be able to sync up to a web service for easy retrieval. Until very recently, I was at a complete loss for such an application. Enter 3banana, a new application for mobile capture for the Android and iPhone platforms.

So far, the application and its web counterpoint, while young, are pretty much bustling with features. Here’s what I really like so far:

• Simple, clean interfaces on both the website and the mobile application make taking notes easy and enjoyable. The single greatest reason I don’t take take more notes on my phone is that it’s usually a pain. 3banana goes a long way toward making things simple enough to actually be usable.

• Tagging your notes is so easy. All you have to do to tag a note is put “#YOURTAG” somewhere in the body of your note. Simple as pie. No complicated interfaces for creating new tags; it just happens on the fly–and that’s the way it should be.

• You can take pictures and easily embed those in your notes! This is a fantastic way to easily archive your photos online, or you can add comments and share instantly via Twitter, Facebook, or a public url. Heck you can do this with any note.

• Share notes via the above mentioned methods, or generate a barcode that can be scanned by other Android users. This is one slick feature, and definitely a really cool and creative use of the barcode function on T-Mobile G1 phones.

• A bookmarklet is available you can take notes from anywhere, and have them instantly available on your phone.

• Even more features like clickable phone numbers and html support round out the package.

While there’s a lot of great stuff there, a few things are holding me back from really using 3banana for large portion of my notetaking. First, there’s no way to export notes…which is an absolute must for me. Customer support has assured me via email that this is in the works, though. Second, there’s no way to search your notes by tag or any other way in the mobile application. This really makes it practically impossible to use as your note collection grows. As soon as these two features are implemented, though, I’ll be using 3banana full force.

Find out more:

• http://3banana.com
• http://blog.3banana.com

Have you used 3banana for Android or iPhone? What’s your favorite mobile notetaking app? Let’s discuss!

(This is the second in my occasional series on mobile productivity – the first post was on calendars.)

There are lots of important reasons to track expenses.  Most people I know need to do it, but almost everyone I have ever met is bad about it!  In my case, the reason is simple: Expenses are usually incurred away from my computer, and therefore away from the main place I would track them.  If you have read any of my other stuff, you will already know that I tend to throw technology at every problem, even when technology is not the best solution.  Well – this is yet another case of that!

My problem with expense tracking /reporting is that it’s very time consuming.  Time spent assembling receipts, categorizing expenses, producing invoices, and sending them to my employer or a customer is all time I could have better spent being productive or relaxing.  As with everything else on WLC, my goal with the research I have done here is to minimize the time I spend on nonsense so I can maximize the time I have for things I enjoy (or actually need to do).

I have naturally attempted to track expenses in a little notebook.  It works – of course it does.  But it doesn’t satisfy all of my requirements for an expense tracking system:

1. Ease of use – it needs to be as easy to use as breathing or it won’t happen.
2. Accessible from anywhere – I spend money all the time, and it often isn’t mine.  If I don’t capture it immediately when it happens, I tend to forget.
3. Able to associate keywords with the expense (project, client, category – whatever).
4. Able to generate expense reports / invoices directly (or at least able to easily extract the data into my own invoices).
5. Ability to easily attach a receipt to a report if needed.

Obviously a pocket notebook and a pen can only satisfy some of these requirements, and then only if they are interpreted pretty loosely.  So I set out to discover some handy tools to address them:

1. An obvious tool was to just use a credit card (or charge card, whatever).  Years ago I switched over to using a special American Express card for all my business expenses.  If you only have one project or client that’s great.  Otherwise it just becomes another deadline you need to deal with (since you have to pay off the American Express in full each month).  Not ideal.
2. For years I have had a Palm-based computing device with me all the time.  There are a lot of decent expense tracking programs for the Palm platform – my favorite is Expense Plus from WalletWare – it also works on Pocket PC machines.  It satisfies most of my requirements – but its hard to attach a receipt electronically (since my Palm, at least, doesn’t have a built in scanner).  I like this program, and recommend it if you feel like you can enter all of your expenses on your mobile device AND feel like an invoice generated out of Excel is good enough.
3. More recently, I have started using services that are “live” – mobile computing based and designed to be used from web- or voice-enabled devices.  These services are actually very good, and address most of my requirements.  Among the most interesting are BillaBill and Xpenser. These services have a rich collection of features, even in their “free” versions.  Xpenser has the added benefit that it integrates directly with Jott and Twitter – so if you are using either of these for your work already, it is an obvious choice.

The tool that is right for you might not be same as the tool that is right for me.  I find myself using Xpenser most often now (via Jott and Twitter) to capture expenses.  I stuff the receipts in my wallet (or portfolio if I am at a business meeting), then once I am back at home base I throw them in a bin for later extraction if I need them for expense reports – most of my clients don’t care.  I could probably also take a picture of then with my mobile phone/camera and do something clever that way.  Or use a device like the (purportedly) awesome Neat Receipts from NeatCo to scan and organize them.  That’s probably more work than my clients require.

So, my recommendation is that you take full advantage of technology to track your expenses (and get the money back – that’s the object after all).  How do you track your expenses?  Discuss it in the forums.

I admit it – I don’t have an iPhone.  I can’t bring myself to switch to AT&T.  Verizon has been very very good to me.  Instead, I have a Palm powered Treo (700p).  Its a classic smart-phone, and it is not running Windows Mobile.  Half of this is because I am old school.  The other half is that I have always used Palm stuff, and I have calendars and contacts going back at least 10 years.  The third half is that I don’t want to be forced always to be online.  I know, I know…  I am soooo last century, but I am not a fan of Web 2.0.  I do not have a desperate need to use as much bandwidth as possible, constantly ensuring that I know whether everyone I have EVER met has been away from their keyboard for 10 minutes.

The good news is that I, like most of you, do have a powerful computer in my pocket.  I want that computer to have all of my critical data in it.  Right now.  I don’t want to have to go get it.  I don’t want not to be able to get a signal and suddenly not know my children’s birthdays (or my parent’s anniversary, which is 6 January – oops).

I realize that lots of people have this problem, and lots of other people have addressed the problem in various ways.  My way of addressing the problem(s) were sort of imperfect. Over my next several posts, I am going to explore various problems and what I think are best-of-breed solutions to them.  The goal is to improve productivity and quality of life by ensuring that the information we need is always up-to-date and at our finger tips.

First up – Calendars!

If you’re like me, and I know I am…you have a bunch of ‘event’ collections.  Kids events, professional events, birthdays, etc.  And you probably have all of these collected on a single calendar – at least I hope you do!  For some people a centrally located physical calendar is good enough (the classic desk blotter calendar is a good example).  I’m a geek – that’s not gonna cut it.  I need my calendar online, I need it shareable, and I need it with me all the time.  It needs to be easy to update, easy to check, and ideally free.  Oh, and Microsoft Exchange / Outlook is sort of a non-starter.

There are many web-based services that fit these requirements.  However, add to this that I need to be able to get at the information offline, I need to be able to make offline changes and get them integrated seamlessly, and I need to be able to let others do the same… and the field narrows considerably.

My current favorite for this is Google Calendar.  There are lots of reasons I like it, not the least of which is that it has a sweet API that makes it readily accessible without all the Google nonsense that some people seem to object to.  Using Google Calendar, you can easily do things like:

• Create multiple calendars for different tasks
• Display some or all of your calendars
• Share your calendars with others
• Subscribe to and have integrated views of other people’s calendars with your own
• Associated reminders with events, and send those reminders via lots of channels (including SMS)
• Allow your calendar(s) to be easily embedded into web pages

The people at Google have done a great job with the basics of calendar management.  They have also continued to extend the environment.  Out of the box, it comes with the ability to sync with Microsoft Outlook, Apple’s iCal, and Blackberry devices.  You can also subscribe directly to some or all of your and other people’s calendars from Outlook, iCal, Thunderbird (via Lightning and Provider) etc.  Finally, because there is a rich public API, many third parties have designed other solutions to integrate devices, software, and web pages with Google Calendar.  Some of my favorite examples:

• GooSync – free and premium service that will synchronize your mobile device’s calendar with your Google Calendar (and contacts, and tasks). Seems to support LOTS of devices, including my beloved Palm-powered Treo.
• Jott – premium version allows you to use your voice to add calendar entries to multiple Google calendars.  Super handy when you are on the go and shouldn’t stop to type in a new calendar entry.  Coupled with GooSync above you can, of course, get those calendar entries on your web calendar AND into your mobile device.  And the Jott native-iPhone application makes this even easier.
• Remember the Milk – has a Google Calendar widget – you subscribe to a special calendar that is bound to your RTM account – can show your tasks and deadlines integrated with your calendar!

There are many, many more such tools out there.  You don’t need to use ALL of them.  What I did was analyze my requirements for a calendar, my requirements for making my life more organized and productive, and then found some tools that would work in concert to satisfy those requirements.  Now I, and anyone I care to share with, can get a view into what I have scheduled.  I can update my calendar from anywhere – any web browser, my mobile phone, my desktop applications.  This has helped me improve my productivity and reduced my stress.  At the end of the day, that’s what a good calendar solution should do!

What do you use?  Let’s discuss the possibilities in the associated forum topic.