Getting Things Done with Gmail Labs

by rahsheen

November 11, 2008

In case you missed it, Google has added quite a few items to the list of nifty things you can do with Gmail since the introduction of Gmail Labs. Some of these features are pretty cool: mouse gestures, canned responses, and even the old snakey game. A few of these features, when combined, give you the opportunity to increase your effectiveness and make sure you’re actually getting things done.

Google Calendar Gadget

If I have an appointment and I don’t put it on my calendar with reminders intact, that appointment will be overlooked and forgotten. This is why I make sure it’s extremely simple to add things to my calendar. With the Google Calendar Gadget enabled, I have an agenda right in the sidebar next to my mail. At a glance, I can see what I should be doing for the week. I can also click “Add” and type in any new appointments using plain english, like “Watch Obama Become President at 11pm on 11/4″.

To activate it, click Settings and then Labs to enable this option.

Email Addict

Email addict will add a link to the top of the page that says “Take a break”. Sitting in your email all day is not productive. It doesn’t matter how you try to rationalize it, you need to get out of your inbox and into some actual work at some point. Also, sometimes you just need to stand up, get away from the computer, and take a break. When you click the “Take a break” link, you will be temporarily block out of your Gmail and chat for 15 minutes. This gives you that chance to stretch your legs a little, or at least switch to something more productive.

Activate Email Addict the same as above.

Remember The Milk

My absolute favorite tool for making sure I’m getting things done. Remember The Milk is a pretty advanced online task manager. You can add tasks a bunch of different ways, including email and Twitter. RTM also gives you quite a few ways to organize those tasks, which is perfect for GTD. With this gadget activated, you will have the ability to view your tasks at a glance, quickly add/remove tasks, and pick which lists you’d like to see. For more information on making RTM work for you, check out Super Charge Remember The Milk.

Activating the Remember The Milk gadget requires a simple two-step process which is illustrated on their website.

Category: web 2.0 | Tags: gmail, labs, remember the milk

Haggis (Sean Loyless)

This is a very effective method of GTD. I also use gMail's labels to throw emails into different categories like "High Priority" "Awaiting Action" and "Low Priority" to help prioritize all my tasks. RTM is definitely an important part of the integration.

sharon

Question:
How do you add information to a action or project email?
say you got a dollar figure, date, password that you want to record with that action when you get to it. how can you add it to that action?
just resend the action with the added info?
Sharon

Rahsheen

In Remember the Milk, each task can have notes where you would put these details.

Not sure of a way to add a random note or piece of information to an actual email. I would create a task in RTM with the details I need, maybe even adding a link to the original email (each task can be associated with a URL).

If you run Firefox, you could run Remember the Milk for Gmail, which allows you to easily create a task linked to an email.