Wishlist as Idea Stash

Image by Lyn Millett via Flickr

Technology Thursday

I love my Amazon Wishlist. Well, wishlists, to be accurate. I've said before and I'll say it forever that I don't know how anyone managed a full-time job and a newborn/infant/toddler without the magic that is Amazon and Amazon Prime ("free" 2-day shipping). Now that those frantic, stressful, days are slowly (slowly) fading for us, I'm still finding their Wishlist technology to be super useful.

You see, not only do I work full-time (more or less, but that's a subject of another post), but I really hate shopping. More specifically, I hate going into stores and pushing giant carts around looking for things to buy. That's not true all the time, but most of the time I try to avoid malls and stores as much as possible. I'm lucky in that my Spouse is willing to do the vast majority of the grocery shopping. (Tangent: Once the Wegman's scheduled to be built 2 miles from my house opens, though, that will all change. Because while I really dislike grocery shopping, I do loooove Wegman's.) But back to the point: so I do most of my shopping online. I don't have time to wander around stores looking for things. An upside is that we don't take my son into toy stores very often at all (maybe 3 times in his life) and so far he tends to treat them as museums, having not quite pieced together the whole toy-cart-checkout-home model of the world. (I am, by the way, comfortable with this lasting as long as possible.)

But the downside of that is that I can be woefully ignorant of what kinds of tools, toys, and technologies are available that might be useful (or fun) for my son or our family. This was a little bit less true when my son was first born, because we did make almost weekly trips to the big baby store (the best one near us is called Buy Buy Baby -- what a horrible name) and so I was able to get a sense of all the sparkly wonderful things available to first-world babies these days. But at a bit past a year-old, he'd mostly outgrown much of that store. And there's no equivalent that I've found for the pre-school set - what would it be? Shop Shop Pre-Schooler?

So nowadays, the way I tend to find out about nifty stuff is through scanning mailing lists, parenting weblogs, catalogs, and so on. And I often want to make a quick note of an idea. For abstractions like recipes, family outing ideas, prospective vacation locations, and so on, I use Evernote (download it; live it; love it). But for things, I use Amazon, specifically, the wishlist functionality. I have several lists there: a public wishlist for me, a private wishlist for me (which is probably more appropriately named: things I might check out of the library some day), a wishlist for the kiddo, and a shopping list (of frequently purchased consumables, like diapers, the big box of rags, and so on.) Most of these are public and I curate my kid's list somewhat regularly[1] so that if his grandparents feel the urge to splurge it's current. But mainly I find it a useful to stash toy, book, and music ideas for quick reference.

We're still sorting out our buy vs. check-out-of-the-library model for books. And we've been really fortunate in terms of hand-me-down toys (although that is understandably dwindling as he gets older). Since he's an only child, I struggle a bit with how much to have in the house (since whatever we get may have a very short window of use, depending on his interests, and won't be amortized over multiple children). Stashing things on an Amazon list satisfies my "Oo! cool toy!" impulse while at the same time giving us time to decide whether it might be worth the investment without losing track of the idea. Add in the reviews (I've decided against many things based on reviews) and the 'things like this' feature that Amazon offers (we found some great puzzles for his recent puzzle-craze) and it's really very useful.

[1] Really, I stuck a monthly item on my calendar to revisit and update his wishlist, because he and his interests change so fast sometime I don't want someone, for example, thoughtfully sending him a squeaky chew toy after all of his teeth are in!

Comments

[eida]

ya wegmans totally rocks!!!

[Karen]

I love Netflix for this same reason - it helps me remember the movies I want to see! I haven't used Evernote, although I downloaded it at a techie friend's advice. I tend to use my iPhone notepad for the same purpose (usually jotting down books I want to read so they're right there when I'm at the library or in the bookstore) and I use a pen and paper to jot down observations about life for my writing - that just feels more sensory and helpful. Would love to hear more about the advantages of Evernote, as I creep into more and more technology-as-life-aids. And I wish Wegman's would invade Montgomery County already!!

[Lyn]

Karen - I've talked briefly about Evernote in previous posts.. do a quick search for 'evernote' in the search box on the left.

But lately, what I'm finding most useful, is ubiquitous access. I have Evernote open constantly on my laptop and my desktop, and I have it installed in my iPhone. They are all synced together. So wherever I happen to be, if I have a thought to add something to the notes I keep there, it's handy *and* it will be replicated everywhere else.

It's easier for me to type on a real keyboard, but I often want access to notes when I'm out and about, so typing stuff at a computer and being able to see it on my phone is really handy. Current notes that I update regularly enough to want this kind of access:
- one line journal (an experiment for this year; 1-2 lines to just jot down what happened that day)
- medical logs (reverse chronological) for each family member
- car logs for each car
- house log
- notes on open loop household items (we're in the middle of a refinance, so I have notes on that in my current notebook in Evernote)

and so on.

I have a reference notebook that includes notes on:
- babysitter notes (things to remember to tell sitters)
- Lush wishlist
and so on.

And I have a whole recipes notebook for which my longterm goal is to eventually scan all the loose recipes stacked in a pile and have them digitally in Evernote (tagged for easy search on dinner/appetizer/dessert/breakfast/etc). One of the features that Evernote offers that I haven't really taken advantage of yet is generating text automatically from images... that will be very handy for the Great Recipe Digitization Project of 20-something-something.