How to Use Gmail as a Business Diary and More Tips

A few weeks back I wrote two posts (Part I, Part II) on how to transform Gmail into your personal nerve center (PNC). These and other similar how-to posts are consistently among your favorites, so I plan to keep at it. They might not seem immediately relevant to marketing and PR, but believe me they are. We all need survival skills like these to keep up with our increasingly wired customers, the torrent of data they generate and our hectic lives. As you read these, think about the applications for your job.

This post is the third in the Gmail PNC series. Most of it will work with other systems, including Outlook and Yahoo - with some tweaks. Like the others, this post has several parts...

• How to turn Gmail into a business diary (Gmail + Jott/Callwave + GCal or Yahoo/MSN  calendar)
• How to annotate books with Gmail as you read them (Gmail + Amazon.com + Google Toolbar)
• How to get critical alerts in Gmail exactly at the right time (Gmail/GTalk + RSS + Feedcrier)
• How to use Gmail into a searchable river of news-style RSS reader (Gmail + GReader + RSSfwd)

Turn Gmail into a Business Diary

Knowledge workers attend lots of meetings. We also have tons of loose bits of information that need collecting during the day. It all needs to be processed. To jog our memory, we take notes. Most of the time this is with pen and paper - unless your culture is laptop/Tablet PC friendly. Many aren't. I use David Allen's GTD system and now buckle it into Gmail as my sole collection bucket.

I long for a searchable record of my meetings and important notes. This has led me to experiment with numerous systems over the years. Ideally, I want my data available 24/7 from any computer or mobile device. Even better, I wanted it organized by date with a list of my meetings on top - e.g. like a paper-based business diary. If you combine an online calendar with Gmail, you can make this a snap.

We have an Exchange Server at work. I use it for group scheduling but I also keep it in sync with Google Calendar. GCal and other systems like it can send your daily agenda to you via email. Mine arrives precisely at 4:38 every morning, often just before I get up. Using Gmail's filters/labels I automatically have these tagged Diary.

Once the message arrives, I keep it in my inbox all day. Then, as  take notes, I reply to the email, but change the address to my own. Then as the day goes on, I keep adding to the conversation thread with replies to myself. These all get threaded as a single conversation.

It gets better. If I am on the go, I will write down the notes in a Moleskine and then call my Jott or Callwave number in between meetings. These arrive in my inbox too (either as text or an audio file). Later, when I am back at my computer I append the note to another reply to me and archive the entire conversation thread. Finally, at week's end I go through all seven notes as part of my weekly review. (The fIgure below is from a weekend - when the review is conducted.)

Annotate Books as You Read Them

I buy a lot of books and audiobooks. Almost all of them are about business or sports. I draw lessons from every single one and I want a way to capture it all. Once again, Gmail is a lifesaver here. This technique builds on the one prior.

Using the Google Toolbar trick outlined in Gmail PNC Part I, I find the book on Amazon.com and send my self a snippet of the title, author and summary to steverubel+secretword@gmail.com. I automatically label these "booknotes" using Gmail's filters. Then as I go, I simply keep replying to myself with the notes I want to keep on the book. These all get archived as a conversation for later search/retrieval.

Get Critical Information When You Need It

Let's say there's a traffic jam on the highway you drive home everyday. Or worse, there's a tornado or even God-forbid a tsunami on the way. You'd want to know about it I bet. You can instantly by combining Gmail with GTalk, some RSS feeds and Feedcrier.

I have Gmail and thus the embedded Google Talk client open constantly when I am at my computer. When I am on the go, I run Google Talk and/or the Gmail for Mobile application (unless I am on a plane). However, I don't miss critical information thanks to Gmail/Gtalk. The key is that it needs to live in an RSS feed.

For example, I pump local severe weather alerts from the National Weather Service into Feedcrier, which sends pings through IM. The premium version of the service will even send these to you when you're offline. You can also do the same with Yahoo Traffic feeds or tsunami alerts.

Turn Gmail Into a Searchable River of News Reader

I use the Google RSS Reader. However, I check Gmail more frequently. Again, this is even more true when I am on the go running from meeting to meeting.

I keep a group of my favorite feeds in a GReader folder called "Faves." You can browse them here. This special aggregation page has its own RSS feed. I take that feed and run it into RSSfwd, which will send you feeds to your email account. Another good service is R-Mail.

As the feeds arrive, they get labeled "Feeds" and archived. However, RSSfwd has a handy threading feature that keeps all of these posts together as a single Gmail conversation. The result is a giant river of news in Gmail! Even better, if I drop and add feeds to my Faves group, I don't have to re-import them into RSSfwd plus they're completely searchable. This technique will also work if you share your feeds with Newsgator Online too.

What hacks work for you? Share them in the comments.

Comments

[jackd]

Incredible, Steve. How long did it take to develop this system? You seem to have a lot of disparate services involved.

[Steve Rubel]

Probably over a few weeks in spurts. Since the last series I have been thinking about what other parts of my life I can streamline. Then I found the services to plug into the Gmail PNC.

[stacy]

Yep, amazing!! I will have to go through this whole series and read it again. I know I could use a lot of these tips to make my life a little more organized and productive. I've tried to go 'all digital' but I just can't leave my Moleskines... Maybe I need to come up with some sort of mash up between the notebooks and gmail.. hmm..
Anyway, thanks for the post! :)

[Steve Rubel]

By the way, if you have Google Desktop the whole PNC gets archived to your drive too for when you're offline.

[Kristen]

unbelievable. I've been using gmail for a couple years, and thought I had a pretty good system. This inspires me to just sit down one day and grab all these services. Maybe I missed it, but how to do sync your exchange email and calendar with gmail and gcal?

[AjiNIMC - Gmail a part of my personal nerve center]

Gmail is almost a part of my personal nerve center. I do play a lot with the filters, like

[todo] goes to todo folder
[knowledge] goes to my knowledge folder
Different team-wise folders and arrangements.

I am trying to define what part of my mail is a mail (message) and the rest are activity reminders or tasks. I wrote about how to handle more than 100 mails a day (http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/100-mails/ ), my experience but certainly needs a consolidated blog post to explain it further.

[Michael Vu]

Steve, what a great system. I am definitely going to implement some of your techniques.

As far as feeds in Gmail goes, have you tried the Greasemonkey Scripts that allow you to display feeds within Gmail?

They're pretty useful, especially if you don't want to go away from your email window.

Cheers!

[Chris]

Incredible, thanks for sharing that.

One question: How are you keeping your Exchange based calendar in sync with GCal? Is there an automated/scheduled way to do that?

[huahua]

hi there.
I'm translating this article into Chinese following CC license.
If there is anything I should know plz contact me by email.
Also u can check the translated version on site: http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/huahua/731
Thx 4 ur work!^_^

[Jennifer]

Is the Google Reader feed your "shared" items?

[Anna Tulchinsky]

This is excellent! Thanks so much. I am posting a link to this tutorial on my website.

[Jay Meattle]

Steve,

This is GREAT.

Instead of using the Google toolbar to send links to yourself/others, you might want to give Bzzster.com a whirl.

Bzzster uses a bookmarklet to email links around. It also saves the links you email (like del.icio.us).

Jay

[Pascal Van Hecke]

check out gtdgmail.com, a firefox extension that transforms Gmail into a GTD-app.

[Chip Warren]

"We have an Exchange Server at work. I use it for group scheduling but I also keep it in sync with Google Calendar."

How do you do this? I haven't been able to find any way to sync the two, and would be thrilled to know the solution!

Thanks,

Chip

[JP]

If the Yahoo traffic feeds does not support your location, you may try http://www.traffic.com/rss.html.

[RAKESH]

Excellent piece of knowledge .
Thanks .
www.mindbodynsoul.com