Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last five years or are a Bing or Yahoo employee, you’re probably plugged into the Google cloud one way or another. Some only do GMail, some do GMail and Docs, and some to GMail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, Wave, Labs, News, and pretty much anything that will shove them further under the oversight of our Google overlords. (Just kidding.)
While there is certainly reason to have some concern about being too plugged into the cloud – downtime, security, and personal data sharing come to mind – spending most of your web time with some Google-based window open in front of you can have its benefits. In particular, I put a creative twist on using Google applications to make my life easier in three ways.
Using drafts as a to-do list
Everyone needs a to-do list. Some are more old-school and use a real-world pen and paper, but going digital certainly works better for me. I need one that’s Internet-based – one that I can access from anywhere. The problem? A lot of online task managers (like Remember The Milk) have too many moving parts for what I need. I don’t require a place to perfectly categorize each task, note its expected duration, or include a due date. Quite simply, I just want somewhere that I can jot down some text quickly and access it even quicker.
The solution? GMail drafts. I have one draft with the subject of “To do” that I continually update with tasks for the day and week. Because I almost always have a GMail window open, it takes no time to call up the draft and remember what I need to accomplish. Simple and sufficient.
Tracking what you track with Google Docs
Tracking is all the rage. Whatever you may track – for me, it’s what I eat – tracking on a computer will certainly give you the best opportunity analyze your data at a later date and draw useful conclusions. Again, however, it’s useful to have access to your data at more than one location, so you can both update and check your tracker at any point.
Google Docs gets the job done here. Set up a nice spreadsheet (complete with formulas for addition and averages, if you like) and you’ve got a no-frills place to track your data that’s available anywhere.
Organize your Inbox Zero
The ‘Getting Things Done‘ religion of productivity has been on the rise for some time now, and the concept of Inbox Zero is probably the most famous component of the practice. The concept is simple: by acting on your e-mail when you receive it (responding, deleting, archiving, saving for later, etc.), you encourage movement on tasks and prevent the piling up of deadlines and to-dos.
Following Inbox Zero (which is the child of Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders) essentially turns your inbox into a to-do list, which can be quite useful, with one drawback: what to do when you’ve completed a task, but need response from another party for the project. You could leave it in your inbox so as not to forget about it and let it clutter up your otherwise clean list, or you could archive it to signify its completeness and risk forgetting you need some type of response from someone else.
The GMail fix? Use multiple inboxes, a GMail labs option that allows users to see multiple lists of e-mail in the same window. Simply create a “needs reply” label for those messages that for which you need a response, and set up a second inbox list that displays any messages with the “needs reply” label. Then you can archive the message, removing it from your main inbox (and de facto to-do list) while keeping it visible in your secondary list.
