Gibber-gabber
Switching to Gmail and other google apps
beingzoe 2008-04-03 20:52:46 UTC

It has been a long time coming. I have been searching for an outlook replacement for a long time. Unfortunately this proved near impossible. Had I never left Outlook Express the task would have been easier. Thunderbird from Mozilla is a superior “express” replacement. But once you ever use the scheduling and tasks inside Outlook, once you have had a palm pilot or similar device, once you have hundreds of contacts stored, finding a replacement is damn near impossible.

For years I have also been contemplating moving away from Windows entirely. And while that really is its own story, it is important here.

I have decided to being using Gmail full time. Obviously I use various Google tools already, such as Analytics, Adwords, Adsense, and Webmaster tools.

But by switching to Gmail I have begun the slow road to getting rid of Microsoft.

But Gmail isn’t exactly an Outlook replacement

True, it isn’t. Not exactly.

Accessing and sorting email is wildly different with Gmail. Their interface uses a predominately search based interface for accessing and browsing. There are no such thing as folders or sorting by from/to/date.

Instead you label things, which in practice is similar to folders but still completely different. So instead of moving emails to folders you use a combination of labels, searching, and archiving to keep your mail organized and accessible.

All emails of the same subject are grouped by their subjects into what Google calls “conversations”. For some, like Mark Johnson of Dali Racing this was insane and ridiculous. For me also this is radically different and may be very hard to adjust to. However, I appreciate what I believe they are attempting to accomplish with this type of functionality.

It seems as though the modern world has converted email from a communication tool to a task management tool. People send email after email managing projects adding to task lists that never leave the inbox.

By treating email as an ongoing conversation, where applicable, inspires more focused conversations on subjects, turning email into a type of forum instead of stand alone messages that might coincidentally be on the same subject. And I think I like that idea. But it might make me rethink how I respond to emails and change/update subjects as they go. Also I might create more intelligent subject lines. But then, maybe that is exactly the point.

This is going to be a somewhat difficult transition. The semantics of Gmail are so different it might take a while to get used to. Like many people I have become addicted to sorting things by folders and not being able to simply stow email away either for later use or archival purposes is going to be a big change. But I am willing to do it to get Microsoft mostly out of my life.

And while Google also offers a calendar it does not seem at first glance to be readily integrated with Gmail in any particular way. But for how little hard dates I have to schedule this shouldn’t affect me too much. I haven’t found the easy task manager yet, but we’ll see. For now I will simply start exclusively dealing with tasks using MS OneNote, which I will mention more in a moment.

As for all the other items that used to be a deal breaker for the Outlook replacment: I no longer us a Palm Pilot type device, I would rather sacrifice the same old interface (that hasn’t really made me anymore productive) for a new mode of thinking (that has the possibility of enhancing productivity), and once I tried to start using IMAP with Outlook and that proved utterly useless in its implementation I will finally be full of glee to have access to my email from anywhere. All told the potential benefits seem to outweigh the disadvantages, and now finally maybe I can start working out at coffee shops and similar places more often, since I won’t be chained to my desk for my email to do list.

Google also offers MS Office replacement tools online, though it remains to be seen if I am prepared to make that radical of a switch. But theoretically between Google Docs and Open Office (and an open mind) I should be able to ween myself away from most of the MS Office suite this year.

And then, as I save my pennies and look to the future, the ultimate goal will be to move to a Mac and say goodbye to Microsoft, almost entirely.

Why not all the way? Because while I have various problems and issues with Microsoft, I have always believed that you stick with the superior product. And Microsoft did a bang up job with OneNote.

OneNote is an amazing “notebook” software, that allows you to take notes and organize information in an easy “notebook” style interface, replete with binder style section groups, section tabs, and pieces of paper. But unlike an analog paper notebook, it can be searched, reorganized easily, and it even has the ability to flag different types of notes so you can quickly display a list of related notes and information over hundreds of pages.

OneNote is great, and even if I manage to switch to a Mac, I will likely continue to use OneNote.

But for now, we’ll take it one day at a time, starting with e-, er g-mail.

Google inbox image flagrantly “borrowed” from the blog of Ask Bjorn Hansen

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