For the Business user General

Mapping work processes on the iPhone

I was sitting in a rather painful meeting last week regarding work processes for another group. The presenter was trying to fit it all into a spreadsheet. It had items with sub items that where indented but didn’t look right on another person’s computer. The meeting then turned to just doing a big text document. Because some paths wrapped back to another path, the document was starting to have many sections repeated over and over again.

A thought hit me to try iThoughts on my iPhone… it worked! Most folks think of iThought as a mindmapping only solution but really it works great for anything that has steps in a path and especially well when paths need more info than just a word or two.

Works in portrait and landscape views:

Any of the boxes can contain additional information either by using the button in the lower right corner or tapping on the box.

Tapping a box on the iThoughts work area brings up more than just editing of the box text. This is where you can quickly change the color, adjust the shape of the box, add an icon and set start/due dates.

Read more
Built in features For the Business user Using every day

Getting an overview of your day through your iPhone

The iPhone calendar can keep you on track throughout your day, but very few folks actually use it. Instead, keeping daily calendars on stickies, the work computer, the paper planner or the front of the fridge. I’m the first to agree there can be challenges in syncing between the many work day planner options but for the rest of us that use Mac or iCal options it is always at our finger tips, why not use it?!

A tip I brought forward from my Palm days was to create ‘different’ calendars for different types of items to be on my calendar. Color coding each differently so a quick glance tells me if I’m running to a meeting room or just dialing in.

Don’t for a minute believe the iPhone calendar is all it could be. It is great at keeping calendar items, viewing a week or day (yes, a limited month view too), setting a variety of alarms and repeating occurances. The ability to vary the font and viewing scale is lacking. And, extended information on meetings in a single view is not supported.

When you have a full day, this is what a day view looks like using your iPhone’s ‘list view’:

Another view that is much more popular for seeing the day as one chunk is the ‘Day’ view:

It is nice to have the color coding and see how the meetings stretch across the time of your day.

If the day view is what you spend most of your time in, you may wish to concider the app “Today’s Calendar“. It presents more information about the meetings you have in your built in Calendar’s Day view. No need to have two calendar entries. Today’s Calendar is a separate iPhone Launcher icon though (added feature is the reason).

All of the built in calendar options are available when setting up a new or editing a current calendar item. The time of the appointments are tied directly to the calendar item to help know exact start/end times. As well, there is an icon to let you know which ones have an alarm assigned to them.

Read more