My friend Kareem left FOX in February. He has co-founded an education company. They want to change the world and they’re taking us along for the ride by open sourcing the start-up.

So Kareem and I made a decision today to start blogging openly about how we are creating Education Revolution. We’re not going to blog everything because (a) that’s impossible and (b) that’s not prudent especially in terms of respecting other peoples’ privacy and the fiduciary responsibility we have to our (soon-to-be) investors. Having said that we’re looking forward to giving you a much more transparent look into what we’re doing than 99.9% of the companies.

With most people being secretive and spending lots of energy worrying about their ideas, it’s nice to see a couple guys doing it open. Of course, they have some ground rules and they aren’t going to be giving away the farm, but the intent to be transparent follows their mission, and should help them–and others. Best of luck, guys!

Once I had a few notes-to-self from Jott, I started wishing for an automated way to get them on my to-do list.

At first I thought I’d hack something up with RSS. Jott has no feeds. Hiveminder (my current to-do list) provides feeds, but they’re read only.

Then the simple solution smacked me in the face: email. Hiveminder, like a few other to-do list providers, have an option to email yourself to-dos. Since my phone can’t send email, I’ve never thought about using the option. Suddenly, I had a use!

How I connected Jott and Hiveminder

1. In Hiveminder preferences, I added an email address, which is randomized for me:

2. In Jott, I added the Hiveminder email address, and told Jott to send notifications there:

3. Finally, whenever I send a Jott to myself, there is a new task waiting in Hiveminder:

All I have to do is accept the task, give it a due date, and then… complete it.

Want it simpler? Here’s how to connect Jott to GMail and make a to-do list with labels.

I’ve been using a new reminder service, Jott. I call a toll free number, leave a message, and it shows up in my Jott inbox (and also emails me a copy, but that’s optional).

Couldn’t be easier. Once I had it available to me, I found myself thinking of ideas or tasks, momentarily considering how unlikely it is for me to remember, and then opening my phone and making the super-short call. Other than using up cell phone minutes, the Jott service is free for now.

The magic it uses to translate my voice to text isn’t really that magical. Though Jott does some machine transcribing, many messages are typed out by humans. They keep a copy of your message so you can go back and see what you said. In one message, I said “JC,” but the phone connection hiccuped and it came out as “AC.” There also have been a few times where words or phrases weren’t included, but they were usually extraneous (so removing them was smart!).

If you’re worried about privacy, you can turn off transcribing. You’ll still have the voice recording, but I think you’d be missing out on the real power of Jott. You’d be better off just buying a voice recorder pen.

On the other hand, if you don’t mind someone transcribing possibly private communications and you receive a lot of voicemails, check out this post on voicemail transcription, which the author calls “a lifechanger.”