Take Virtual Notes with Your Cell Phone Recorder
You may think of your cell phone recorder only as a device for recording phone calls, and certainly that’s its primary function, but there’s more to using a phone recorder, especially one that works with your cell phone, than just "recording calls." In fact, you can consider your recording device to be a portable secretary. It’s a lot more convenient than writing things down, and a great deal cheaper than using an actual secretary.
You’ve no doubt been away from your office and needed to take notes on something, but couldn’t reach, or didn’t have, paper and pen. Maybe you were having a phone conversation in your car, or maybe you were at a job site or even out to lunch and just didn’t have a good way to write things down. Whether you’re on the phone or not, your cell phone recorder can help you keep up with things when you don’t have a way to take notes on paper.
Cell phones are great. They let us take our business with us, and be available to our suppliers, clients and project partners wherever we may be, and whenever we need to talk to someone about what we’re doing. That’s a good thing, or it is most of the time. However, sometimes being away from the office and trying to do business is a little like trying to hang glide without a glider. You have great ideas and conversations, but you can’t do anything with them because you don’t have a record of them. This is where having a cell phone recorder comes in really handy. Remember, you don’t have a portable secretary, but you can use your phone recorder to make up for the lack.
Whether you’re talking on the phone while driving (using hands-free gear, of course), or thinking about your project while grabbing a cup of coffee, you need a way to "take notes" that you can access later and make sense of. Driving and writing is a particularly bad idea, and it’s also not a very good way to take notes, because later you’re probably going to wonder what that weird scrawl means. The idea situation would be to record voice notes wherever and whenever you are, and be able to access them later. Chances are your voice will be more comprehensible than your notes, and you can record almost anywhere, except the movie theater. Even then, you can go out in the lobby if necessary.
You already know that you can use your cell phone recorder to record phone calls; that’s why you bought it, after all. But you may not realize that you can also use it as a voice recorder. So, with one machine, you can "take notes" (record) all of your phone calls, and record notes and memos to yourself to help you make sure you don’t forget your great ideas or the tasks you thought of while you were driving down the road or standing in line somewhere. Of course you’ll be polite in public, but you’ll also get a lot more done.
You may have to consult the manual for your cell phone recorder to see exactly how to use it as a voice recorder for memos and such; they all have slightly different controls. But almost every phone recorder on the market can also be used as a voice recorder, and most of them have fairly intuitive control functions for that.
The important thing to remember about getting the most out of your cell phone recorder is that it doesn’t matter where you are, what time it is, or what else you may be doing. If you need to record a call, a voice memo, or even a conversation with someone else, your phone recorder can handle all those tasks. Whatever you need to record and capture, your recording device can make keeping track of things easy and painless.