Having recently been through a somewhat distasteful divorce (all but being called an abusive and negligent father), I came to recognize the need to establish custody records while I have my son.  The need arises because I need proof of both my own and her actions.  This way she cannot call my integrity into question again, and should the need arise, I can use the records to establish her own pattern.  The various things I need to record are pickup and dropoff times, interaction with his mother (a very very important task), and basically record everything I do with him.

After a search on the Internet and briefly perusing the software offerings, I determined that none of them were adequate.  They were all hard to use, not very feature rich, or just plain junk.  I had thought about recording things in my Outlook calendar (I already use it to schedule the times I have my son), but thought that backing it up and searching for records would be too difficult.  Then I remembered Jott.  I already use it to remind myself of to-dos, why not use it for my custody records?

So what is Jott?  Jott essentially allows you to send a text email with your voice.  How it works is, you call their phone number, tell them who you want to send a message to, and then tell Jott what the message is.  It will do all of the voice translation to text for you.  Now the caveat is, you have to tell Jott all of your contacts and their email addresses.  But for the case of making notes for yourself, when you call in and it asks, “Who do you want to Jott?” you just answer “myself”.

Now in the case of custody records, all I have to do is call Jott with my cell phone and make a quick note of what just happened concerning my son or his mother.  The record will get sent to my email and I just move that email to an archive folder.