You may or may not know that you can use voice commands on your Android device to quickly dictate a note by saying “OK Google, note to self” followed by whatever you want the contents of that note to be.  By default, this goes into Google Keep, which is somewhat useful, but I don’t actually use Google Keep for all that much – somewhat ironically, I use it mostly to jot down things I don’t plan to keep long-term, like shopping lists.

However, thanks to the extensibility of Android, Google Keep is just one of several services that the “take a note” command can tie into.  For me, the most useful one by far is any.do. I might use Google Keep and Evernote, but I need my to-do list – it often drives my entire day – and any.do is still the best multi-platform to-do list I’ve found.  Ever since I discovered I can create a to-do item simply by saying “note to self”, I’ve been using it pretty constantly.  The fact you can now activate voice commands from almost anywhere in Android just makes this all the more useful, especially when working out or driving, where a lot of my random thoughts and ideas decide to come to me.  Even when the voice transcription isn’t perfect – “review Art’s email” turned into “Review artsy mail” – it’s almost always close enough that I can decipher what it’s referring to.

Considering how often (probably too often) I use my smartphone as a “second brain” to remember to do things I would otherwise almost certainly forget, I figured this was a tip worth sharing.  Now if I could just mark things off the list with my voice…