Managing my time, tasks, and personal information is a major challenge. My attention is often fractured among competing priorities. The complexity of it all can be quite overwhelming at times. In this article, I will briefly outline a few of the techniques I use in order to try to stay on top of it all. Some I have used for a long time, and others I have discovered only recently.
Summary: http://www.trailfire.com/rowanrook/trailview/53758
Managing my time, tasks, and personal information is a major challenge. My attention is often fractured among competing priorities. The complexity of it all can be quite overwhelming at times. In this article, I will briefly outline a few of the techniques I use in order to try to stay on top of it all. Some I have used for a long time, and others I have discovered only recently.
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Manage tasks quickly and easily.
An intuitive interface makes managing tasks fun. Set due dates easily with next Friday or in 2 weeks. Extensive keyboard shortcuts make task management quicker than ever.
Now you can manage your Remember The Milk tasks alongside your emails. Connect your tasks with your mail, contacts, and events in Gmail.
Remember The Milk for Google Calendar
Use Google Calendar? Now you can manage your Remember The Milk tasks from within Google Calendar.
Use Remember The Milk offline (requires Google Gears browser plugin).
IMified is an instant messenger buddy that works across all major IM networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications, as well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. Imified helps you get things done faster.
WHY SHOULD I USE IT?
Because you shouldn't have to launch your browser to add a new appointment to your Google calendar, or complete a todo in your backpack account. Imified is always open, sitting right there in your favorite IM client ready to help. If you have an IM client running on your mobile phone, you've got instant access to your applications wherever and whenever. Cool huh?
 | AIM: IMified |
 | MSN: imified@imified.com |
 | Google Talk: imified@imified.com |
 | Jabber: imified@imified.com |
All of these tips require any IMAP or hosted Exchange email account to work. I wrote this with GMail in mind, which now thankfully supports IMAP. This post has several parts...
- Make the Personal Nerve Center the hub of your online life (Productivity Apps + GMail/IMAP)
- Create a portable, offline version of the PNC that works on any computer or mobile device (USB drive + Portable Thunderbird + iPhone/Treo/Blackberry/Windows Mobile + GMail/IMAP)
- Build an "in case of emergency, break glass" PNC (Portable Thunderbird + Box.net + GMail/IMAP)
- Pump up your PNC with the power of search folders (Outlook/T-Bird/Mail.app + GMail/IMAP)
- Capturing anything and everything that has your attention
- Defining actionable things discretely into outcomes and concrete next steps
- Organizing reminders and information in the most streamlined way, in appropriate categories, based on
how and when you need to access them - Keeping current and "on your game" with appropriately frequent reviews of the six horizons of your
commitments (purpose, vision, goals, areas of focus, projects, and actions)
Here are some of the main pros and cons vs. the best official Google gadget:
- Con: You must “Edit Settings” and add the ids of all the calendars you want to track. With the official gadget, it automatically grabs all your calendars from gcal
- Con: To access your private calendars (e.g. your main one), you must stay logged in to gcal. When your login times out, you must pop over to gcal to refresh it before the gadget will display
- Con: Doesn’t yet have Quick Add (although if there is interest, it will)
- Pro: It loads much quicker. The official gadget locks up Firefox for 15 seconds or more and spikes your CPU. YAGCG puts the workload on Google’s servers instead (where it should be, of course).
- Pro: Easy to quickly scroll ahead to future events. The official gadget only shows a day at a time
- Pro: While you must add the ids of all calendars you want to track, that also means YAGCG has the flexibility to track a subset, or a completely different set, of calendars than what you track at gcal.
Some other notes:
- “Edit Settings” on the gadget to add your personal calendars and remove the default one
- The address of your main personal calendar is your google account email address
- Go to Google Calendar, click “Manage Calendars” and look at the id of each to find any others, and also add those via “Edit Settings”
- Comment below with any questions, suggestions, bugs, or opinions on the value of this gadget vs. the official one provided by Google, and all the rest.
- Gadget code hosted at http://code.google.com/p/gcalgadget/
- [21-12-2007] In “Edit Settings”, you can now add calendars in many formats: the calendar ID directly, or just paste in the XML, iCal, or HTML URL, or even the embedded javascript for the calendar. It will parse out the (name@domain) calendar ID. Note if you have a lot of calendars, you have to stay under 1024 chars total — that means stick to the short calendar ID where possible. (thanks to Rob, Geoff, and Mike for suggesting easier adds)
- [21-12-2007] A menu added
- “Today”: Reloads agenda to show today’s events
- “Full Page”: Loads Google Calendar in a fresh Tab or Page
- “Help”: Takes you here.
- [21-12-2007] “Edit Settings” now lets you set the agenda height, so you can show as much or as little of your future events as you like
I have started using Gmail as much more than an email host. With its gobs of storage, speed and tremendous search/tagging capabilities, you can transform it into a personal nerve center that's available from any computer or mobile device. When you tap into this power and combine Gmail with some other tools, it is perhaps the most essential site ever developed. Most of the following life hacks have not been documented.
This series has several parts...
- How to turn Gmail into a massive personal database (Gmail + the Google Toolbar)
- How to get real-time news updates in Gmail (Gmail+ Google Talk + Twitter)
- How to automatically store your bookmarks in Gmail (Gmail + del.icio.us + Yahoo Alerts)
- How to manage Calendar and To-Dos in Gmail (Gmail + Backpack + GCal + GTalk + iMified)
- How to blog from Gmail (Gmail + Wordpress/TypePad/Blogger + IMified)
The latest version of the Google Toolbar has a send to Gmail function. Select some text or graphics, right click on it and send it to Gmail. The Toolbar then automatically feeds it into a new message.
Now, when I find something I want to save I use this feature and send it to a secret contact in my address book. This is basically a steverubel+[secretphrase]@gmail.com email address (Lifehacker explains the value of these here).
Once the article arrives in my Gmail inbox, I have a filter whisk it a way into the archive and tag it with an @Database label. Further, I am toying with having the same filter also forward these to a premium Google Apps account that has 10 gigs of space. Now all I need to do to call it up later is enter label:@Database and a keyword. Whammo - an instant personal database.
