More Ways to Use Gmail as a Personal Nerve Center

Since my last post about my unorthodox uses of Gmail, I have been thinking there might be more ways I could be using it as my Personal Nerve Center (PNC). And in fact, there are a bunch. Time on the road away from my computer helps! Many of these work well in other web clients too by the way. Here's another round. (Note: as of this writing, Gmail is acting up. Murphy's Law. However, I have found that 99% of the time it is fine.)

* Create a Mobile Searchable Database of PDFs (Gmail + Adobe PDF Conversion by Email)
* Archive Your Weblog and Comments and Make Them Searchable (Gmail + FeedBurner/FeedBlitz)
* Import a Searchable Version of Your Calendar (Gmail + Google/Yahoo/MSN Calendar)
* Build a Weather or Sports Almanac (Gmail + Windows Live Alerts)
* A round up of other ideas

Create a Mobile Searchable Database of PDFs (Gmail + Adobe PDF Conversion by Email)
Like many of you, I have gobs of PDFs on my computer. Most of them are research reports written  by analyst firms like eMarketer, Pew and Forrester or even PowerPoints. Sometimes I need to pull up a nugget of information from them in a split second. Often this occurs when I am away from my computer or logged out of the server at work. In fact, my colleague Leah was asking me about one of these nuggets today. Now I have a solution.

Although Google extracts text from attached PDF files, it does not index the contents in the Gmail database. This limits its utility. Thankfully, Adobe (which I should note is an Edelman client) has a free service that will take care of this for you.

All you need to do is email your PDF to pdf2txt@adobe.com and they will send the full text of the PDF back within minutes. These files can be searched from within Gmail. Then set up a filter from the Adobe address (noreply@adobe.com) and have the messages archived and automatically labeled. Now you have a searchable database for your PDFs - oh and it's fully accessible via a mobile too.

Back Up Your Blog and Make it Searchable (Gmail + FeedBurner/FeedBlitz)
Feedburner and other services like Feedblitz can take your RSS feed and convert it into an email newsletter for readers who don't use RSS.

I have been using Feedblitz on my blog for years and I subscribe just to make sure it is working correctly. I used to delete these emails but now I figured out they can actually be quite useful. I set up a filter, as described above, to archive these emails as soon as they arrive. As far as I know, Google doesn't place a limit on the number Gmail filters.  Now I can search my blog quickly from the PNC by using the from:Feedblitz command and my search keyword. Plus, I automatically have a backup for my entire blog.

By the way, if you use Blogger, you can configure it to automatically email your posts once they go up. Here's the result when I searched for from:Feedblitz ajaxy newsgator. (Bonus tip: you can create a searchable archive of all your comments by archiving the email alerts and mining for them later.)

Create a Searchable Version of Your Calendar (Gmail + Google/Yahoo/MSN Calendar)
I don't know about you, but I a few years back I started saving old versions of my calendars - even from when I was in another job. I keep them on my desktop and occasionally search them.  In fact, just the other day I referenced an old calendar to find a hotel I once stayed at in San Francisco.

Archival calendar data on the desktop is useful,  but it's even better on the web and it's awesome when you roll it into your Gmail PNC and it's mobile. So even though I manage my calendar on the desktop, I export it into Google Calendar every few days and make sure that it sends me my daily agenda via email every day. Yahoo and MSN Calendar have similar features. I have a filter whisk these out of site and bingo - I have a quick way to search my calendar right from Gmail - and, most importantly, on the go.

Build a Weather or Sports Almanac (Gmail + Windows Live Alerts)
Quick, what was the score the last time the Bears played the Jets? What is the W-L record of the Dallas Mavericks against the Phoenix Suns the last three years? Finally, what was the weather on your birthday the last five years? If you care about this stuff, set up your Gmail PNC so it can quickly fetch it for you.

The secret is to sign up for alerts and have them archived. In my last post I mentioned Yahoo Alerts. Microsoft has a bunch of good ones too - including Fox Sports - and they are sometimes more reliable. You should configure these to alert via email and for the final score. (Disclosure: Microsoft is an Edelman client.)

For weather, check out Accuweather and Weather.com. They too have email services. You can also take any RSS feed and run it through a service like Rmail to create all sorts of archives.  Once you're set up, all you need to do is filter, archive and search and your good to go.

What other types of information can we store in a Gmail PNC? Some of the ones that come to mind are a but more manual. Movies is a good one. Using the Google Toolbar method described in my last post you could clip and save movie information from a bunch of sites and annotate them with your own reviews. Some folks store recipes in Gmail. Combine this with a recipe-a-day email service and it becomes even more powerful. Share your Gmail PNC ideas in comments.

Comments

[Matt]

Admit it: Your ultimate career goal is to write for the Lifehacker blog. :)

Great tips, thanks.

[Steve Rubel]

Nah, but once in awhile I get on these kicks. And they help me do my real job better!

[chrisco]

Wow, calm down, man... Comment intended in a friendly, fun tone... It really is exciting all the neat stuff that's possible now and going to be possible soon. Cheers, chrisco

[John A]

Great post. One way I archive webpages while using Safari on a Mac is to hit command-I to 'mail contents of this page'. Sending it to gmail creates a remote, searchable copy and keeps my computer free of less important info. One drawback is that ad images are included and this method doesn't work with Camino or Firefox, as far as I know.

[Mitch]

Great post. I tried to send some pdf files to the mentioned email address (pdf2txt@adobe.com). But it didn't work out. I got a automatic response from the Adobe mailer daemon that said that the email address had permanent fatal errors. What's wrong?

[Thomas Bosch]

The conversion service for PDF files sounds really interesting but it isn't really practical for sensitive business files. You can't send sensitive information to Adobe for conversion!

[Leah]

You realize that you can no longer make "not at my computer" excuses to me, right?

Thanks for finding a work around, I know it will make a difference and not just for me.

[Hball]

Good post steve. I've been using Gmail since the Beta as well, and I've started to use it as an "access anywhere" file storage system for things I don't want to lose, like photos and CVs and things. I email things to myself in ZIP files, and then I assign them to a group called FILES. I also tend to put FILE: XXXXX as the subject, so I can easily search for them. Works a treat for me, and no need for any third party gDrive hacks etc.

[Asha]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the incredible ideas. Another one from a Parent Hacks reader -- she uses her Gmail account as a baby book. More like a collection bucket for notes from family, diary entries, musings from her parents, pictures, even medicine doses. When her daughter's old enough, she'll have this virtual shoebox of memorabilia.

[Kelly]

Fascinating post - I recently started using Gmail and have seen a lot of potential in it, but this list goes way beyond my own ideas. The ability to access and/or streamline my computer "environment" from a remote location (not my computer) has the capacity to dramatically alter the way I work. Thanks for the inspiration.

[AjiNIMC]

I am using gmail for simplifying life. I recently wrote about how I use gmail to handle over 100 mails a day.

[Carissa Thorp]

In your previous post, you mentioned sending yourself a picture of someone's office. I may be wrong, but while any text you send to gmail is saved to their servers, any images aren't saved, but rather loaded from the original page. To actually save your own "archive" copy of an image, you'd need to attach it to the email somehow.

This has been a problem for me with most of the services like furl, or Yahoo's Bookmarks/MyWeb and others; text is cached, images aren't, or at least that's my understanding. Trouble is, sometimes a document/blogpost loses its usefulness without its images. It only takes a site to move or shut down.

Just something to keep in mind.

[宝丰生产线]

生产线之家:宝丰生产线,众城生产线,鹏卓生产线