This blog entry is part of a continuous writing on the topic of “optimizing smartphone usage for smarter life”.
If you haven’t done so, please start reading from the first article on this series.
Database is not only about office work and professional environment. We need database too for our personal life. Even though many people never realized this need. Our brain is not made to store everything in order like computers. Sometimes we forget things. Sometimes we just can’t recall something when we need the most. A personal database in our smart phone will certainly help that.
This blog post is the seventh part of 8 posts I will write about optimizing smartphone for smarter life.
I will write this guide based on iPhone. Simply because iPhone is my primary smartphone for now. Most of my tips and guides should be applicable for Android, Windows Phone and other smartphone OS. But you might need to do a bit of more research to find out how to get similar function in that OS.This guide will NOT teach you step-by-step how to setup or use the features. Rather, I am trying to inspire you with a feature’s functionality and how we can benefit from it to live smarter life. More productive, more time efficient, more organized.
Personal Database
What is a personal database and why do we need one?
Example 1: Imagine you’re enjoying weekend in a neighborhood you’re not familiar with. Suddenly you remember there is a nice place to have lunch around there, and the last time you visited was a year ago. Now you need to think hard to remember the location of that restaurant, and how to get there. Sure you can open web browser in your smart phone and Google it, but that’s going to take some time, especially if the place is not so popular to be findable by Google. You can ask Siri, but Siri’s database is still very limited, mostly for US locations. For the rest of the world, She’s not so useful in finding places.
Solution: If we have a personal database in our smartphone, we can record our favorite places (not just restaurants). We can record their address, how to get there, their business hours and anything you can imagine.
Example 2: You’re in a shop and find a very nice shoes for your sister and want to buy it as surprise. But you can’t remember her size. If you call her to ask, it won’t be a surprise anymore.
Solution: If we have personal database in our smartphone, we can record clothes, pants, shoe size, or anything we need to remember about people close to us.
Ok, now you have some idea about personal database. Here’s some more ideas about things we can record in a personal database:
1. We can record places (restaurants, stores, interesting places, vacation spots, anything) with their address, how to get there (by car or by public transport), their business hours, their GPS location, photo of the location, their website or email, their entry ticket (if any) and many other things related to those places.
2. We can record sizes of our clothing, plus the sizes of people that matters to us.
3. We can record bank accounts, either our own accounts, or the accounts of other people.
4. Theoretically we can also record our credit/debit card numbers, but for this one I suggest you not to do. Even though our personal database is encrypted.
5. We can write daily journal, to remember important things happened in a day.
6. We can record our membership numbers, such as frequent flyer numbers, cinema loyalty card number, health insurance membership ID, codes for our alarms, any number basically.
7. We can record a little bit more than just numbers of those memberships. For example, instead of just having the number of our car insurance, we can write down the last time the car had its regular maintenance, the last insurance claim, etc.
8. Anything that can be written or recorded digitally can be part of personal database.
In iPhone, there are two popular apps to handle Personal Database: Bento and Tap Forms. I choose Tap Forms simply because Bento hasn’t receive any update for so long. I choose an app with more active development so future changes (like OS upgrade) will be taken care of. Tap Forms is available for iPhone, iPad and Mac OSX and everything I write in one location is automatically synced with the others through iCloud.
Why do we need special app if we can just use Notes app, Photos app, etc?
Simple answer: for a quick of access. I did it before, using notes, emails, calendars, photos, reminders to write down things. As a result, when I actually need an information FAST, I was confused on where did I write the information earlier. Having a one centralized app to record everything is more convenient, we always know where to find information, data are searchable, everything becomes more organized.
What’s the difference between personal database and other apps like Evernote? Evernote use the concept of “note”, it’s like the default Notes app, with with rich contents. Arguably, you can also choose Notes-type apps to “store” your database, it’s a individual preference I guess. Personal database, as the name suggest, is a database. So we can create our own forms, define what fields should be stored in for a particular set of data, then start filling in.
Of course, this needs a habit of writing down the knowledge. If we just had a nice time dining in a good restaurant but forget to write down the details about it, then we won’t get anything next time we need to retrieve the information. Smartphone is a tool to help, it’s up to us to maximize its usefulness.
Optimizing Smartphone for Smarter Life, list of topics in this series:
1. Calendar, Reminders, Notes
2. Maps and Trip Planning
3. Communication and Collaboration
4. Reading and Learning
5. Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation
6. Content Creation
7. Personal Database
8. Saving Money
*. Epilogue
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Apple and/or Google and do not receive any financial benefit from writing this article.
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