Google Made Me Do It...

A few weeks ago, I posted a status on Twitter about how I was vowing to never abuse my drafts folder ever again. I abuse my Gmail in many ways, but probably my worst Gmail habit is using my drafts folder as an electronic junk drawer. Rarely are any of the items in the folder actual drafts that need to be sent, but I recently I was looking for a copy of a Eng 101 handout and found an email that I had actually drafted to send out months ago that had been buried in my drafts folder and had never actually gotten sent.

While I will take full credit for many of my less than productive and organized habits, I blame this one on Google. They make it too easy for me to abuse my Gmail and use it for non-email related purposes.* In some ways I miss the lack of functionality and limited storage capacity of Missouri State's old Bearmail system.** With that email account, I literally ran out of space a couple of times a semester, so I had to be vigilant about deleting old emails and prioritizing what I really needed to keep. I couldn't email myself multiple drafts of a paper and store them all on my email.

Somewhere along the way, I got a Gmail account and instantly fell in love. I didn't have to worry about Bearmail being down or getting overrun with spam. Most of all, though I didn't ever have to delete email or empty the trash ever again.

I instantly developed some bad habits. I stopped distinguishing between important and unimportant email, but more importantly, I began using Gmail as a replacement for disks and flashdrives. Early on this wasn't really a problem because I didn't have that many documents that I had emailed to myself and digging through a handful of emails was so much nicer than having to constantly regret deleting something because of space concerns. I liked that the drafts folder was a convient place to put attached files without cluttering my inbox, so I started putting stuff there and never really stopped.

Fastforward 6 years... Same bad habits as above, plus add:

• emails that I drafted but never listed a recepient because they were responses that I knew I could never send
• hyperlinks that I'm sure I'm going to need in the future
  
• reminders for everything from meeting times to grocery lists
• files that I emailed to myself for later access but failed to include a specific subject line***
• emails that I used as templates for things like responding to student proposals
• nearly 100 blank emails****
  

When I went into my drafts folder to look for something a couple of weeks ago, I knew that I had to work on cleaning out my email. Even Google's wonderful search capabilities were being hindered by the sheer volume of email I had kept. My problem is how to tackle this reorganization of email without becoming completely overwhelmed.

I haven't gotten my email completely organzied yet, but I did make some progress. I completely deleted nearly 6,000 emails in the last two weeks and created some filters and labels to help sort the new mail, but I'm still quite a ways away from undoing 6 years of abuse. I really wish I could set up a feature on Gmail that would say things like "is this really a draft?" or "do you really mean archive?" or better yet, I need gmail to create an option to have all email that I create but don't send to self-destruct in 30 days.

I know once again relying on Google to fix my problem isn't really fair, but seriously 7,000+ MB of space is not helping me be a more organzied person.

*Yes, I realize that it is not Google's responsiblity to keep me organized, and that they create many other tools that could theoretically help me get more organized, but if my students don't ever have to take personal responsiblity, why should I? :)
**To clarify here, I mean the one that couldn't automatically empty the trash, didn't have a spam filter, and often ran out of space if you emailed too many Word documents (pictures were not even an option). That system didn't even warn you that you had run out of space, you had to verbally tell people that you tried to email them and got a message back that they were out of space.
***I have tried to stop doing this in the last couple of years, but have since found that I my solution (i.e. 170 handout) is not much more help.
****seriously, I guess when I hit compose and then get distracted or decide to do something else and Google asks if I want to discard, I subconsciously save them all. Sometimes, these have an addressee, but no subject line or message. Most of them are just blank.

Evernote v. OneNote

I realize that this is a really obscure question, but first a little background. I've been playing around with notebook programs now that I've become slightly obsessed with tagging and internet organization apps and I have to keep a research log for my very last class ever. I'm not the type of person who keeps pages of notes separate from the original text. I write on the text, highlight, draw arrows, and even sometimes reminders about things not related to the text (Sorry B). So for me the idea of researching and then submitting separate paragraphs about the text sounds like the least kind of helpful research log I could ever use. Nearly all of the readings are in PDF form, so the logical idea was to use some sort of web program that would capture the text, clip it, and then allow me to type in the margin.

Zog told me about Evernote, but while I was waiting on approval from Evernote for an account, I discovered OneNote. Now, Evernote will allow me to import the notebook from One Note, but it lost some of it's editability in the process. I would prefer to actuatly use Google Notebook, but at this point it does not offer the interface with PDFs that I currently need. Thoughts on which application is better...more user friendly...more universal.

3 days, no keys

I recently lost my keys for the longest stretch yet. I have things in place to prevent this--friends have extra keys, there is a "landing area" by the back door. The problem was I went to Chicago with a friend last Wednesday, and she drove. That meant I entered and exited from the front door (for explanation see Alley Etiquette). Hense, the keys disappeared for the first time in a long time.

They reappeared today. Apparently our sofa bed eats things. This has happened before, and I thought it was a fluke, but the sofa bed really hides things. They don't just fall down behind the cushions, they work their way all they way inside the folded mattress.

Thanks to Zog, for the visual depiction of a sofa bed with an agenda.

Who knew a label was so useful?

When I started blogging, I was well aware of the fact that I was years behind in technology. I surfed the internet, emailed, even had my own course website for a while, and collaborated on Google Docs, but I had never really taken the time to investigate any of the programs I had heard friends talk about. In my mind a label was a piece of sticky material that was sold in sheets.

Part of my aversion to looking into social networking and other technological innovations was the computer situation. My laptop was good, but it was a little dated and I tried to avoid as many ad-ons and processor drains as possible. When that computer died in an unfortunate run in with Diet Dr. Pepper, we bought a new desktop that happened to come while I was on my brief summer break and I discovered the label.

At first there was a lot of set up time that seemed to be yet another way of wasting time, but the product has been well worth it. I went through my web history and bookmarked everything in Google Bookmarks. I generally use the same 2-3 computers and don't access every site on every computer, so I had just used windows bookmarks in the past. As I transferred them, I labeled everything. This accomplished two things, one is made the drop down list much more manageable and two it made me really stop and think about how and why I use various websites. Initially, I had things labeled in fairly specific categories, but what I discovered that I love about labels (as opposed to the older folder systems) is that the same bookmark can appear in two different places. For example, my school email is listed under "teaching" and "email."

By chance, I had explored Google Bookmarks before other applications, but as I moved on to programs such as Reader and Notebook, I discovered that the system I put in place for bookmarks really was helpful in my everyday life. The materials and websites I have gathered for my dissertation can be quickly located under "diss" in all of my applications. While they don't quite all interface as much as I would like--I can't search reader for a label and pull up things in Notebook yet, I've been amazed at how much more organized it has made me. I was worried that like real and electronic folders I would end up with duplicate versions of similar categories (Ex. Children's lit, Children's Literature, children's lit, etc), but since Google references my other labels and suggests an option, this hasn't happened yet.

I'm definitely a fan, and I'm amazed I made it this far without the electronic label.