Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail
This post is the first in an ongoing series about how web-savvy home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time using Google Apps. Topics I’ll discuss in the series include:
- Using Gmail as the first step towards getting my home office out of my home and accessible anywhere.
- Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments.
- Staying current with Google Reader
- Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
- Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office.
So let’s start with Gmail. For years, I held onto my beloved desktop email software: Mail.app on Mac OS X. The usual Apple polish combined with incomparable integration with the computer operating system itself was enough for me to overlook some of the limitations not shared by other programs.
So I kept using Mail.app until I began to be continually frustrated because I couldn’t get to my mail while out of the office. Since my iMac resides comfortably within the confines of my home office, I had to physically be in front of the machine to access my email, and frustration ensued whenever I was out and about.
I did a little dance with Yahoo! Mail several years prior and got burned in a mystical lost-password-lost-email-account situation. It was an endless loop on which I wasted many hours, trying in vain to recover data locked up within Yahoo’s merciless servers.
Enter Gmail.
When Yahoo! trashed my email account, I was just using it as a throwaway email address to sign up for webisites that required such things. I thought Gmail would serve the same purpose, but as I began to use it, several features stood out as quite useable:
- Emails are stored in a conversation-like display by default, meaning I could easily follow ongoing email discussions and refer back to them effortlessly.
- Tons of storage: almost 7 gigabytes of email storage available, growing all the time.
- Integrated instant messaging lets me talk to my friends with Google accounts from within Gmail.
- Amazing spam filtering: I NEVER get spam in my Gmail inbox. Never.
- Google Search built-in: this allows me to search through both emails and archived chats with lightning speed.
So Gmail began to grow on me–very quickly, in fact–so I decided to make the jump to an all-web-based-email. Gmail is my killer web app because it works, simply and elegantly, consistently, and from whatever computer I can put my hands on.
Of course there are some limitations and less-than-desirable interface elements. As a Mac aficionado, I prefer the elegant, aesthetically pleasing interaction with technology that Apple delivers. So the circa-1998, flat, HTML-ish look and feel of Gmail was a little off-putting at first, and seemed out of place in my glass+aluminum polished Apple world.
But what Gmail lacks in elegance and polish, it makes up for with usability. The web app gets out of my way and let’s me do what I need to do. I don’t have to roam around, wondering where in my folder structure I placed that all-important registration email with all the passwords. Now, I can find it faster by searching for it.
A few other things to be aware of:
- As is Google’s usual modus operandi, Adsense ads are served along the right side of the screen, relevant to whatever information is contained within the email. They’re unobtrusive, but they’re there. If this bothers you, a desktop app may be your best bet. I don’t have a problem with it, and some of the ads are actually useful.
- I have some misgivings knowing that Google has indexed my “private” email, but I’m willing to trade that off for the usefulness of Gmail. This is one of those leaps of faith that we all have to take from time to time, and Google’s history of trustworthiness allays my fears to the extent that I can use their fantastic service without any difficulty.
So, step one in your journey to liberate yourself from your home office may be to migrate to Gmail. You can start here by creating a Google Account. Also take a look at Google’s Getting Started Guide, then print out the cheat sheet of Gmail shortcuts.
These actions will take you one step closer to freedom from your home office shackles. Please let me know in the comments how you use Gmail in your day-to-day operations.
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5 Responses to “Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail”
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Great post. Look forward to more in the series.
[...] Google liberates the home office, Part 1-Gmail is the first in a series of post from a fairly new home office blog, Home Office Web Tools. I like this blog and this new series is just one example of why. As you all know from reading some of my recent post, I am a heavy user of most of the great tools Google offers. Gmail being one of them. [...]
Some of the other powerful gmail-isms to mention are:
1) You can pull in all of your mail from other accounts so you can have your messages all in one place
2) You can send mail from gmail using a different address. You can even set it to “respond using the address on the original message” (or something like that).
And, you hinted to it early on, but I’ll drive it home — iPhone+Gmail=Happiness
A nice post. I really need to explore more of the Google options. I hadn’t thought about how they’d make accessing things from anywhere in the world easier. Of course, I’ve usually got my laptop with me when I’m traveling and have most anything I need, but still.
@Lindsay,
Google is amazing! While I have concerns about privacy, the convenience and liberation I experience using Google’s products is a reasonable trade-off, IMHO.
Think outside the laptop for a moment: I have access to my Google data via my iPhone. Access to all my documents right in my pocket, wherever I am.
There’s a lot you can do with data once Google has it–share it, publish it to the web, invite people to interact with it. I have much more to say about Google Liberation in other articles and a coming podcast, so stay tuned.