My name is Eric Graig and I am the founder and Managing Director of Usable Knowledge LLC. As part of my consulting work, I am always on the lookout for useful tools to help me stay organized and I regularly write about evaluation, consulting, and tech tools on my company blog at http://www.theusableblog.blogspot.com/
Rad Resource – Reqall: Reqall helps me create to-do lists via mobile phone when I’m on the road, away from my computer. It’s available for the BlackBerry and iPhone. The description below covers the BlackBerry, but the implementation is similar on Apple’s product. Let’s say you’ve just left a meeting and you need to remind yourself to follow-up on an issue that came up. Instead of writing the to-do down for entry in your computer later you call Reqall and add it automatically along with a due date. Reqall will record the to-do and you can access it through your browser. If you include a due date, Reqall will send a text message to your phone 30 minutes before the time and date you specified.
I use Reqall primarily as a way to capture to-do items as they come up, but Reqall has a number of other features that are worth exploring. For example, if your smartphone has GPS capability you can associate particular locations with particular tasks. Let’s say you make regular site visits as part of an evaluation project. You could create to-dos for that site and when the GPS senses your proximity (you’d need to designate the center), Reqall would send you the appropriate reminders. You can also share to-dos. Instead of leaving yourself a to-do, you could send it directly to any of the contacts you’ve entered into Reqall.
As with many such applications, Reqall plays well others. You can use it with Evernote, Google Calendar and Outlook. Reqall has both a free and a pro account with a monthly charge of $2.99 with expanded services. You can learn more about Reqall at http://www.reqall.com/about/compare_pro_standard
This contribution is from the aea365 Daily Tips blog, by and for evaluators, from the American Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org.
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Eric, I’ve finally given Requall a try and it is pretty spiffy. I primarily use “Things” for my iPhone and Mac for task management, but just found out that someone has written a script that allows it to work in conjunction with Requall. So, I think I’m going to start using Requall to capture those to-do’s when “out in the wild” (i.e., I’m unable to type them out on my phone). Great resource!
Thank Eric. This is great resource. I use Toodledo which is free app for Iphone but it doesn’t have all the functionalities of Reqall. Will add this to my techology to do list.