Regular Inside iPhone readers already know that I'm one of the new authors here. What you probably don't know is that this is not the only new job I started in July.

Last Monday I started working for a travel-related Internet company in Manhattan. The office is about 70 miles from my house as the crow flies. In an era of $4.00 per gallon gas, I need to use mass transit.

I take a NJ Transit express train from Hamilton, NJ to New York Penn Station every morning. I do my job and I try to come back home on another express train. Considering how long it takes to drive a car along parallel routes, it's incredible that I can make this leg of the trip in 64 minutes.

When you use mass transit to get to work in New York City, a specific form of personal organization and self discipline is required. You need to:

• know the schedule of the transit lines you take.
• know alternate routes in case a significant delay occurs.
• get access to realtime information when disruptions happen.
• find businesses who provide services you need when you have unexpected downtime.

The iPhone and its 2.0 firmware are helping me solve these problems in unprecedented ways. Here are a few tools that are helping me:

• Evernote (free): The Evernote iPhone application is where I keep my train schedules. I used the desktop version of Evernote to grab portions of the New Jersey Transit timetable. I place two small screen captures in a single note, one for outbound train information and one for inbound.

  I also keep screen captures of schedules for a couple of alternate routes in case they are needed: a bus route from Port Authority Bus Terminal to Princeton, NJ, and a bus route from Penn Station in Newark to Woodbridge, NJ. Neither of these routes get me to my origin. They are for situations where a major service interruption has occurred and I can't get use the railroad to get back home.

  The reason Evernote is so useful is that it saves me having to wade through six or seven pages of the NJ Transit website each time I need schedule information. Safari on the iPhone is awesome, but if I can't bookmark the exact page I need, it's hard for me to access while on the move in New York.

  I could use an image editor, assemble a composite image of the information I need, and store it in a photo on my iPhone. But if I do that, I lose Evernote's ability to search for text in images, which might come in handy.

• Safari (built into the iPhone): Safari comes in handy for accessing the status pages that each transit agency maintains for their system. I have bookmarks for the exact pages on NJ Transit, the MTA, and the PATH Rapid Transit System websites that tell me if there is a delay, and if there is a recommended alternate route.

  At some point, I may try to construct bookmarks that let me listen to audio streams for the all-news stations in New York because they often have more detailed information when something really goes wrong. I know this is possible, but I haven't actually done it yet.

• OmniFocus ($19.99): OmniFocus for the iPhone helps me schedule and prioritize errands, and also take advantage of unexpected downtime while I'm in New York.

  

  Now that I have gotten OmniFocus for the iPhone working, and figured out how to define the location of contexts properly, I love the "Nearby" context screen on OmniFocus.

  This allows me to know that how far I am from a business that can provide the goods and services I need. For instance, when I am in the office, I am 0.1 miles from a Container Store and 0.7 miles (6 blocks) from an Apple Store. I know this because I have defined Apple Store and the Container Store as two of my "Errands" contexts and I often need to pick things up at these places.

  More important is the ability to find a branch of my bank when I am on the way back from a meeting in Manhattan. I can withdraw money from any ATM if I want to pay a small fee, but if somebody mails me a paper check, I need to deposit it with a teller or one of my bank's ATM machines. OmniFocus' business search allows me to query Google's database of businesses instead of setting one specific location for each context.

  If I think ahead, enter all of my errands, and assign them to the right contexts, OmniFocus helps me figure out which errands to do whenever I have a few minutes to spare. In my opinion, this is a pretty good example of how to use location based services to enhance productivity.

Update: If you want to know more about how to assign locations to OmniFocus contexts, check out Assigning Locations to OmniFocus iPhone Contexts on OperationGadget.com.

These are my favorite iPhone applications from the first week at my new job. Do you have other iPhone apps that make your commuting life easier? Tell us about them by posting a comment.