Getting Things Done Google Tips (GTD)

We live in a world today where there are billions of dollars worth of software brilliance available to anyone with a web browser and the software simply within your basic operating system contains more features than any single person could name.

Using these applications and tools in collaboration is an exercise in creativity learning from your peers. So here are some tips that I've amassed over many years of attempting to get the computer to bend various Google Properties to my will.

First up email (I'm an avid GMail user as are many people). Many people compulsively Archive and folder away email. This is a additional handful of clicks that simply is a waste of time. Archiving simply removes it from your Inbox and doesn't have any performance gain. You can already leverage read and unread marks in order to determine whether or not the email has been addressed. I could get behind archiving at the end of a day since that would only take one action but personally I have no desire to since it just reduces the amount of information you see.

Gmail and other emails that support an easy way to tag things have become a very useful tool for me. I've created my own little workflows within my email by using custom tags. "TODO - Assigned", "TODO - Received", "TODO - Complete". I use these to make sure that I can follow up on delegated task and revist incomplete task. I do something similar with bills, "Bills - Received", "Bills - Paid".

For the longest time I used Star and Unstar, however I abused this to the point where I neglected it altogether so if you are having this problem I would suggest figuring out your own workflows.

Google Reader Tips -- (Learn about Google Reader and RSS)

Google Reader is a great tool for teaching if you are in a position where you are training someone, Or finding new interesting blogs from people you are friends with that also use Google Reader. Simply go to your Sharing Settings then send a request to your friends. No need to wait until you are at a party and try to remember the name of some obscure blog. Just follow people and any item that they choose to share will appear on your list. Imagine the power of having extra sets of eyes pairing down content they don't deem share worthy and introducing you to new things.

You can subscribe to almost anything with RSS these days: News, PhotoAlbums (Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Comics, Calendars). Anything where you see RSS, ATOM, or this icon ().

Google Calendars allows you to publish your calendar as an iCal format these can be consumed by nearly any calendaring application in a readonly fashion.

Shared Google Calendars are great. Add an additional calendar for US Holidays and your favorite sports team. Make sure to add separate calendars for separate logical things. So that you can hide and show/ share the calendar without worrying about sharing private events or unnecessary information. With the notifications feature of the calendar you can truely create your own tickler style workflow in conjunction with email.

I'm currently using separate calendars for each employee to manage assignments and initiatives.

Google Bookmarks is one of my favorite seemingly abandoned Google project. I'm really hoping that they integrate this one with Google Chrome since it is my current choice for recreational browsing. It is already integrated with FireFox via the Google Toolbar plugin and I would really like to see this in Chrome. When you are using multiple computers / browsers it's really awful trying to figure out where you may have bookmarked something. Pushing this to the cloud with something like Google Bookmarks, delicious, etc is the only thing that makes sense. Google Bookmarks supports tagging and search like any good Google Product.

Use Picasa Web Album to share images because it will not resize them down a non - printable size. Sharing will be easier with Picasa Web Album since it's a google property and many of your friends will already have a Google Account. If you manage your photos locally with Picasa 3 like I do then you can quickly get rid of red eye, crop, and reformat all your images then click the "Upload" button at the bottom of the screen to Upload them to Picasa Web Albums in order to share the high res images with your friends (without having to send them in several separate emails). Then if you want to push them up to Facebook as well. That's easy, just use this Facebook plugin that works with Picasa.

Wow google has quite a few web properties. Use them, they are free. I will be covering some techniques for getting things done with Windows Vista/XP and certain freeware products.