Busy Season? Don’t Lose Your Mynd!

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” ~ Henry Thoreau

I love the holidays! But they can be pretty tough to navigate, what with parties, church and synagogue events, school happenings, gift shopping, cooking, work, and everything else I’ve got to manage. Thank goodness for my iPad, because otherwise, I would forget about Grandpa Bill’s annual Christmas Luau. And that party is a hoot!

We’ve talked about applications for getting organized before. Well, I’ve found a new one I think you’ll like: “Mynd” calls itself the “calendar with a brain.” That might be taking it a little far, but it’s pretty darned smart.

The best applications can integrate with other apps to make your life easier. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s say you’ve got an appointment with your lawyer at 3:00. When you made the appointment, you put it into your smartphone’s calendar. (You did do that, didn’t you?) On appointment day, your calendar sends you a reminder, and you’re ready to get in the car and go – but you don’t remember where her office is. If your apps aren’t integrated, you’ll have to exit your calendar, go into contacts, and find your lawyer’s address and jot it down. Then you’ll have to exit contacts, get into your GPS application and enter the address. What a pain in the neck! Don’t you wish your calendar could just talk to your contacts list and fetch the address for you? Well, that’s exactly the kind of convenience I’m talking about.

Mynd’s real strength is its ability to link with other apps, especially Evernote and LinkedIn. Those apps are worth explaining here. Evernote is a very handy app that sets up storage space in the “cloud” where you can keep important files. So, for example, if you have a document and you want to be able to get it from any computing device, you can put it in Evernote. You can put all kinds of things in there – pictures, documents, and more. And here’s an important bonus: when your computer crashes (and sooner or later, it will crash), everything you’ve uploaded into Evernote will still be there, safe and sound.

The second application I mentioned is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is similar to Facebook, except that it’s designed for professional contacts rather than for friends.

So your calendar entry in Mynd isn’t just a calendar entry anymore. It’s a link to everything you need in order to function at a particular event.

Let’s take a look at how Mynd manages all this information for you. Let’s say your lawyer is one of your LinkedIn contacts, and she needs to sign some documents. When you make an appointment with her, you’ll enter it in your Mynd calendar. Then you’ll link the calendar entry to the documents she has to sign, which you’ve uploaded into Evernote. When the time comes to see your lawyer, Mynd will find your lawyer’s LinkedIn profile and tell you where you need to be, how to get there, and how long it will take. And it’ll also put those documents just one touch away. It even gives you a link to instantly contact the lawyer to let her know you’ll be late. No muss, no fuss.

Another thing I really like about Mynd is the way it’s designed visually. Most calendars give you a list of the events you’ve got on a particular day. Mynd will do that if you want, but the default view, which uses attractive and easy-to-read panels, is a lot more fun. In fact, it’s downright trendy. Not only do you see what’s next on your calendar, you also see the people with whom you’re going to meet and how many tasks are left to be done. It even tells you about the weather. Pretty snazzy, if you ask me. Oh, and I love this: when I’ve finished everything on my calendar for the day, it gives me one final reminder in big, bold letters, and it’s one I often need: Playtime!

As of this writing, Mynd is only available for iOS (iPhone and iPad). That limits its usefulness for people who use Android smartphones. Hopefully, though, it’ll soon be available for them as well.

In the meantime, Mynd is getting me through the holidays this year. So if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to get myself a bowl of Grandpa’s Hawaiian figgy pudding!