Gmail turns 20

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I mentioned a few days ago that I’m not super happy with Google lately, but a few days before that I shared how I just can’t shake Gmail. The math says I shouldn’t use it, but that’s much easier said than done.

It was exactly 20 years ago today, April 1, 2004, that Google introduced Gmail to the world. Because Google is well-known for April Fools jokes, it took some time for people to believe that it was real. Most free email services offered perhaps 4MB of storage, and Google was offering 1,000MB of storage, completely for free! It was incredible.

Conversations

They also helped to pioneer the concept of “conversations”, with emails lumped together in threads. It had been done before, but they brought it to the masses and I’m sure you can appreciate how amazingly useful that feature is (if not, go into your Gmail settings and turn “conversation view off” and see how it goes).

Since then…

In the time between, Google has done some awesome things with Gmail. Storage is now 15GB for free, and the cost to buy more space is very minimal ($1.99/mo to go to 100GB).

They’ve added little things like “Send & Archive” (my favorite!) and bigger things like “inbox types” to let you see things in very different ways.

Because of the massive storage and ease of use, I just checked and I have just over 780,000 messages between my two Gmail accounts (not counting those that I’ve deleted + spam over the years), so it’s clear that I’ve found it to be very valuable for the last 20 years

It started as a relatively small invite-only system, and today hosts roughly 1.8 billion active accounts. Gmail has helped shape the internet in a great direction, and I hope they can keep it going for another 20 years.

Here is Google’s original press release from 2004 touting the great new service.

Do you still use Gmail? How do you feel about it these days?

Writing doesn’t begin with a blank page

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If you know you need to write something and you’re struggling with where to start, a big blank page sitting in front of you can be very intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.

For me, notes are the key. Before I sit down to write anything, I already have a few notes put together for what I’m going to write about. In looking at my notes for this particular post, the note was created about a week ago and now I’m sitting down to write — but it’s easy to get started because I have those notes to help get me off the ground.

Related to note taking, here are some thoughts from Sonke Ahrens in his book “How to Take Smart Notes“. He starts off by removing the idea of the struggle:

They struggle because they believe, as they are made to believe, that writing starts with a blank page.

It’s echoed in a quote that he shares from Armin Nassehi, who said:

The white sheet of paper – or today: the blank screen – is a fundamental misunderstanding.

It really just comes down to note-taking. Simply having a rough idea and a few quick notes to get started makes it 100x easier to get rolling. Here’s what Ahrens said about that:

And maybe that is the reason why we rarely think about this writing, the everyday writing, the note-taking and draft-making. Like breathing, it is vital to what we do, but because we do it constantly, it escapes our attention. But while even the best breathing technique would probably not make much of a difference to our writing, any improvement in the way we organise the everyday writing, how we take notes of what we encounter and what we do with them, will make all the difference for the moment we do face the blank page/screen – or rather not, as those who take smart notes will never have the problem of a blank screen again.

My individual notes can often be very short, but it’s enough to get me started. Just having some idea of where you’re going can make all the difference in the world. For example, my post a few days ago about “That’s a great question” started with just that one quote in it. By putting that quote into a post, I was able to write around it and get started.

Publishing a new post every day isn’t easy, but I’ve not had to sit down in front of a blank screen in a very long time. I keep reading, I keep making notes of what I read, and the writing takes care of itself.

Processes over routines

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I recently shared more thoughts on have routines instead of goals (“Just do it“), but in some cases processes can beat routines. For exercise and learning, I think routines can be great, but if your life is more varied it can be hard to stick to a routine. In those cases, processes can take over in a good way.

In a recent interview with MrBeast, Ben Wilson shared this thought about Napoleon:

“Napoleon’s secretary wrote about it and said that he didn’t have routines, because he couldn’t, because who knows what would happen, but he had processes. So like, when this happened, when he’s got to make a decision about these, these people come into a room and get out the binder.”

Processes have built our company. We don’t do the same thing every day, as different projects are in different stages, so processes are much more important in that context than routines.

Between goals, processes, and routines, they all have a place in our lives.

For me, routines win in my personal life, but processes rule my work.

11: When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?

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We’ve reached the 11th and final question “Tribe of Mentors” by Tim Ferriss (see all previous questions here), and it’s a good one!

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? (If helpful: What questions do you ask yourself?)

There are three great answers that I pulled from the book.

The first is from Neil Strauss, who chose to break the question into two different answers:

Overwhelmed and unfocused seem like two different problems. I’m thinking that overwhelm is about mentally managing what’s coming from outside yourself, while unfocused is about mentally managing what’s going on inside. Overall, what would work for both is to think of my mind as a computer, and the RAM is full. So best to shut it off for a little. For me, this means stepping away from work for anything from a cold shower to a surf to meditation to a breathing exercise outside to talking with someone I immensely enjoy. Anything healthy that gets you out of your mind and into your body is ultimately good for your mind.

The next is some advice from Andrew Ross Sorkin that I’ve heard before, yet I still struggle to implement:

Whenever I’m feeling like I need to prioritize what I’m doing or overthinking a particular situation that is making me anxious, I try to remember this great exchange in the film Bridge of Spies. Tom Hanks, who plays a lawyer, asks his client, who is being accused of being a spy, “Aren’t you worried?” His answer: “Would it help?” I always think, “Would it help?” That is the pivotal question that I ask myself every day. If you put everything through that prism, it is a remarkably effective way to cut through the clutter.

The final answer to this question comes from Steve Aoki, who some thoughts on getting into a state of flow:

To give an example, The Clash finished one of the best albums in rock history, London Calling, in three weeks. They finished that entire album so fast, in my opinion, because they were in a state of flow. In times like that, you are extremely productive and creative. When I’m in that state of flow, I stay there as long as I possibly can, because once you’re out, it’s hard to get back in. If you’re hitting that wall or getting upset with yourself and can’t get back to finding inspiration and creativity, you have to reset and go back to the basics.

For me, I’ll follow after Neil Strauss that I handle “overwhelmed” and “unfocused” in two very different ways.

  • For feeling overwhelmed, making sure all of my inboxes are at zero and then making lists will help me get control of what’s going on and allow me to figure out next steps.
  • For feeling unfocused, movement is often the key and some exercise (often even just a walk) will help quite a lot.

This was a fantastic book, and I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already. For the question today, though, what do you do when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused?

Strategic Luxury

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I had an interesting set of conversations on consecutive days last week and it taught me a new phrase.

When chatting with Ali, she talked about how she consistently tries to find little ways to make her life better. It could be a better jug for her water (and all of the little ways her new one is better than her old one), or a pen that is easier to use. She makes frequent, small changes to help make life just a little bit better.

The next day, my friend April was expressing the same thing, but she had a fantastic name for it: strategic luxury.

While I’m not as good about it as either of them, it’s indeed something I work toward a little bit at time, and you’ve seen some of it on this blog. Some of it is software based:

Or hardware based:

Much of the “luxury” comes from even smaller things, though:

  • Frixion pens for writing (they’re excellent)
  • Making sure to keep a lens wipe in my pocket at all times for my glasses and phone

There are tons of little things I’ve bought or changed over the years that each make my life just a tiny bit better. They add up, and I’ll always be tweaking my systems to make things just a little faster, a little more efficient, and a little more joyful.

Strategic luxury for sure.

What are some small changes you’ve made to bring just a bit more strategic luxury into your life?

Efficiency vs Effectiveness

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I’ve long thought that efficiency and effectiveness were roughly the same thing. There are some small differences, but they’re both about getting things done.

After reading more about both, their differences are more pronounced than I realized.

Peter Drucker separates them simply by this:

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

That’s a good way to view, but I also look at them through the lens of focus.

With efficiency, you’re mostly looking at short-term problems. If you go knock out 50 emails from your inbox, that’s efficient.

With effectiveness, you’re looking more long-term. This is setting aside time and focusing on a single problem at a time.

Efficiency comes easy to me, but effectiveness takes work. It’s similar to what Carol Dweck shares in the book “Mindset“, where she splits people into those with a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset”.

An example from Carol’s book:

“So what should we say when children complete a task—say, math problems—quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, “Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Let’s do something you can really learn from!”

If your children can plow through their math questions, that’s a perfect example of being efficient without being effective. After all, what did they learn from those easy questions? Not much.

I’m still going to work to be a very efficient person, as there are many advantages to that, but carving out specific time to become more effective is something I always need to be working on.

A Nimble contact list

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I’ve briefly mentioned the tool “Dex” on here a few times, as it’s a great tool to help you remember to catch back up with old contacts. It does an excellent job, but it has one major problem — it doesn’t sync with my contacts.

It can pull in my contacts, as well as email and other things, but it can’t do a two-way sync. This means that for every new contact I get, I need to put them in my contact list as well as in Dex. The same for if I need to update a phone number or email address, or really make any kind of change to a contact. It’s not critical that their info is perfect in Dex, but I still would much rather be able to update a record once and know that it’s fixed everywhere.

I’ve looked at other tools similar to Dex (like Relatable), but it had the same problem — no two-way contact sync. I reached out to the folks at Dex and Relatable, and they both said they’d love to add that feature but it’s really complicated and likely wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

Nimble

That’s when I decided to take another look at Nimble. It’s been around for over a decade, and I’ve looked it a few times in the past. I never quite went for it before because it was lacking some features and was a bit buggy, but as they’ve continued to develop it they’ve turned it into a pretty solid tool.

If you’re not familiar with it, here is a quick overview video:

It doesn’t have two-way contact sync built-in, but it works perfectly with SyncPenguin and I’ve been amazed at how smooth the combination of those two has been.

However, while Nimble will work great as a contact manager and a reach-out reminder tool, their core focus is as a CRM and sales pipeline tool. Could it replace that for us as well? Yes, it turns out it can.

Their pipeline sales tool isn’t quite as robust as our previous tool (Copper), but it’s solid and does a nice job.

One tool to rule them all?

This starts heading toward the conflict of using multiple tools that are each great at what they do (here are all of the tools that I use), or using one tool that is good enough and handles everything. I generally steer toward using separate tools, but in this case it’s one tool for all and it seems to be working well. Ultimately, it’s doing three things for me:

  • Contact Management. If I add or edit a contact in Nimble, it syncs to my phone, and vice-versa. This means I can spend time in Nimble really keeping things organized and it will reflect on my phone and in my email.
  • Contact Reminders. I can tag people with reminder timelines (“make sure I talk to Chris every quarter“) and it’ll keep an eye on my email and calendar and remind me when it’s been too long and I should reach back out.
  • CRM / Pipeline. I also can keep agency leads in here and track the sales process like we’ve been doing in Copper.

Pricing

While Nimble isn’t super cheap, it’s quite affordable and will actually save us some money.

Before:

  • Copper: $708/year
  • Dex: $240/year
  • Total: $948/year

After:

  • Nimble: $298.80/year
  • SyncPenguin: $204/year
  • Total: $502.80/year

(SyncPenguin has a cheaper plan at $9/mo, but I think I’ll need the $17 plan.)

Right there I’ve taken our annual cost from $948 –> $503 per year, which is great! However, it’s actually a bit better than that. Right now we have three of us on the Copper plan, so it’s actually costing us $2,124/year. If I put all three of us on Nimble ($896.40/year), the total cost goes from $2,364 –> $1,100.40, saving us over $1,200/year!

My goal with this wasn’t to save money, but that’s certainly an excellent side benefit.

For many people, Dex might remain a solid choice for contacts, and Copper is certainly a great tool for sales pipeline management. For me, at least for the near future, it seems that Nimble is going to be an excellent change for this part of my workflow.

What do you use for these kinds of tasks?

A paper planner on a digital notepad

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For the last few years, I’ve kept a rough schedule on my digital notepad (first the reMarkable, later the Kindle Scribe), and the tools keep getting better every year.

Planning tools aren’t native on either device, so I’ve been purchasing templates from “ePaperTemplates” on Etsy. They make some great templates at a fair price and I’ve enjoyed them.

In the case of these templates, they’re just really fancy PDFs. You can load them onto your reMarkable or Scribe (or iPad or Supernote or whatever) and access them that way. There are two key things that make this work.

  • Because of how these tablets are designed, you can write on the PDF and fill in your schedule.
  • These tablets all support PDF links from page to page. This means you can tap on the month and be taken to that overview, click on a specific day to jump to that page, etc. It feels like a seamless bit of software, though behind the scenes you’re actually jumping from like page 14 to page 127. The links make it work.

This video shows a bit about how it feels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtR4ImZEnFc

This year the software has gotten quite a bit fancier, at least during the process of purchasing one of these.

In previous years, they’ve essentially just released a variety of PDFs and you pick the one you want. This year, there is some pretty nifty software to let you build your own layout, and then their tool will assemble it and send you the PDF.

Even better, they produced a demo of the tool so that anyone can try it. For example, this is the one I purchased, so I adjusted a few things in here to make the planner work the way I want it to work. It’s excellent. The demo is pretty slick and you can play with it here.

No distractions, but no syncing

The beauty of these tablets are the lack of distractions. As a result, I feel comfortable using them in a meeting when a laptop might be less appropriate.

The flip side is that you can’t sync a PDF like this to your Google Calendar or anything — it’s all manual input, and I love it. As I’ve shared before, making some things intentionally inefficient can be a huge benefit. In the case of this planner, I tend to be a bit hit-or-miss with it, but I find that I tend to use it more when my week is busier. Taking the time to hand-write my schedule in there can be a great way to sniff out any other conflicts that might arise.

I still can’t say for sure if you should get a tablet like this (my pros and cons from three years ago are still accurate), but if you have one you should consider picking up one of these planner templates and see if it ends up being valuable for you or not.

How can I pay for that?

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I’ve always been a believer in supporting the apps that I use the most. So many small, useful apps go out of business every year, so I try my best to support them and I encourage you to do the same.

Snipd

For example, the popular “Airr” app on iPhone was forced to shut down last year. I never used it because it was iPhone-only, but I know a few folks that did. These days I’m using a similar product called Snipd, and I don’t want them to fail. In the case of Snipd, the free version is really all that I need, but I’m paying for the premium (like $70/year) to help support them.

Anki

This is another tool that I find indispensable and I want them to last. In their case, however, they make it fairly difficult to give them any money. The app is free to use, and they don’t accept donations, which makes it tricky to try to support them. They make a little through the sale of the iPhone app ($25). The other option is to donate to their Android app, which I do from time to time.

Evernote

Back when I used Evernote, their free version covered all that I needed. However, I still paid for their basic premium package to help support them. I hate that they’ve fallen so far (and their price has risen so high), but I was happy to pay back when I relied so heavily on their service.

It adds up

There are other apps that have small fees (like Dex and Readwise) and I’m happy to pay those. There are some amazing tools that I use, and want to see them all succeed. My tiny payments won’t help much, but it adds up.

Speaking adding up, though, is the cost of all of these things. It’s only a few dollars here and a few dollars there, but can become a decent chunk of change every month. I try to be careful not to pay for too many services (particularly those that I’ve forgotten about), but the ones that I use frequently are well-worth the cost.

I feel good about most of these services sticking around whether I donate or not, but anything I can do to help increase their odds will only serve to keep making my life easier.

Google Tasks is finally decent

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Did you know that Google has a task management app? Not many do, because it’s been tucked away and largely ignored for years. It first came out in 2018 as a feature in Gmail, and has slowly expanded into a more full-featured app. It’s still rather bare-bones, but some recent improvements (as shared by The Verge a few months ago) have made it into a contender for simple task needs.

While it’s a very basic app, the integration it has with the full Google suite of products makes it compelling. In short, if you use Microsoft or others for your email, Google Tasks is of no value to you. However, if you use Gmail and/or Google Workspace, there might be a place for it.

Core features

Google Tasks allows you to create tasks, assign due dates to them, set them to repeat if needed — and that’s about it. In terms of task management, it’s very straightforward. In terms of integration with other Google services, though, it’s got some neat tricks it can do.

Sidebar

First, you can have it show up in the sidebar of many Google apps (Gmail, Calendar, etc), and it can do some simple interactions.

For example, you can drag an email over to tasks and it will create a task for that message. When you click the task in the future, the related email automatically comes up.

Or with Google Calendar, you get a few benefits. First, you can drag any task onto your calendar and it will assign the appropriate date and time to the task. Also, you can enable your “Tasks” calendar and see all tasks among your calendar items if you choose.

Google Assistant

If you ask Google Assistant to “remind me to switch the laundry in 45 minutes”, it puts that in Google Tasks. In fact, it’s doing that already whether you want it to or not, so using it for other tasks helps bring things together a bit more.

Mobile

It has a mobile app for Android and iPhone so you can take it with you. The app is very simple, but matches the web experience 100%.

Standalone

Speaking of the web experience, while it’s great to have it in the sidebar of other Google products, it can also be helpful to have it as a separate tab/window. Google doesn’t show this easily, but you can pull it up at assistant.google.com/tasks.

The downsides

All of that said, there are some serious downsides to using Google Tasks.

First, it’s not good for multiple accounts. I use my personal Gmail and my Google Workspace side-by-side, but those are different accounts. Tasks in one don’t show up in the tasks for the other, which is why I often work from the standalone window.

Second, it’s Google, and there’s a very real chance that Google will shut it down and it’ll show up on KilledByGoogle in the next few years. The chaotic history of Google Tasks isn’t reassuring, either, but this would be an easy product to migrate away from if I ever need to.

Lastly, as I’ve mentioned a few times, it’s not very powerful. This is a positive thing if it fits what you need, but it’s likely underpowered for most uses. A big hurdle is that you can’t share tasks with others, so this can only work for your personal task list.

In my case, our agency uses ClickUp for our main task system, and I’m only using Google Tasks for small personal and/or quick items — reminders to take out the trash, publish a podcast episode, etc. The majority of my work is in ClickUp, and I can’t see how Google Tasks would work as the main task system for most anyone.

If you’re looking for a simple task management app, Google Tasks might be the one. If you need a bit more power, something like Todoist is always a great choice. If you need more than that, you’re likely working with others that would need to be in there with you, making it a very different kind of conversation.

What do you use for your task management?