Archive for February, 2008

Before the weekend I discussed how I have deeply synchronized my desktop email client with Gmail. I did this because Gmail acts as my central mailbox for all of my email accounts, of which I have many. It should probably come as no surprise that my love affair with Google does not end with email. I am also a huge fan of Google Calendar, which I use extensively for three purposes:

• Scheduling and setting reminders for my appointments.
• Sharing my calendar with others.
• Keeping track of all the things I do when I feel the need to "audit" how I am spending my time.

There are all kinds of useful features available with Google Calendar, such as integration with Gmail, Managing invitations and reminders, supporting multiple calendars (e.g. one calendar for work, another for home), sharing calendars, etc. These benefits have been described elsewhere. Instead I wanted to discuss how I have synchronized my Google Calendar with my desktop calendar.

For my desktop calendar I use Lightning, which is a Thunderbird add-on. The Lightning extension basically integrates Sunbird, Mozilla's calendar application, into Thunderbird which is my desktop email client. To synch my Google calendars with Lightning, I use another Thunderbird add-on: Provider. The Provider extension allows Thunderbird/Lightning to read and write events in your Google calendars. A great tutorial on how to set this up can be found here. GCALDaemon can also be used to synch desktop calendars with your Google calendars. Besides Thunderbird/Sunbird, it also supports synching with other email clients such as Evolution and Apple's iCal. I just find the Provider add-on easier to install and use.

Popularity: 17% [?]

In a previous post regarding the consolidation of multiple email accounts into a single inbox, I mentioned that I use Gmail as my central mailbox. I also mentioned that because Gmail supports IMAP, you can use both the Gmail web interface and a desktop email client to send and receive email while keeping both in synch. I wanted to expand on exactly how I keep my desktop email client synchronized with my Gmail account.

Before we get started, one rather obvious question is, why use a desktop email client at all? After all, if you are using Gmail as your central mailbox, you could just as easily access Gmail from a web browser on your desktop - synchronization problem solved! That's a legitimate point. Scott MacGregor, Thunderbird's lead engineer, makes a good case for preferring desktop email clients over webmail. All I can say is that, while I love Gmail, desktop email clients just seem to feel better.

Using Thunderbird

I am going to cover using Thunderbird, Mozilla's cross-platform e-mail application. It is based on the same technology as their Firefox browser. It has great filtering and junk mail features as well as the ability to be customized via add-ons.

The first thing you need to do is enable IMAP on your Gmail or Google Apps for your Domain (GAFYD) email account. You then need to do a basic setup in Thunderbird for fetching Gmail via IMAP. This is covered in another Google tutorial. The key is not to use the Gmail option when setting up the account in Thunderbird:

The basic setup, and also some commentary on using a desktop client vs. the web interface for Gmail is covered in the following video:

So far so good. At this point, we are successfully using Thunderbird, a desktop email client, to access our Gmail. Most importantly, our desktop and web based Gmail are completely synchronized - if you make a change in Gmail via the web based interface, it will be reflected in your desktop email client, and vice versa.

Thunderbird Tweaks

You could stop here, but that would be too easy! By default Thunderbird uses its own folders for handling sent mail, drafts and trash. We want Thunderbird to store these emails in the same place as the web based Gmail. We also want items identified as junk by Thunderbird to be tagged as spam in Gmail. All of this is addressed here in Lifehacker's Turn Thunderbird into the Ultimate Gmail IMAP Client article.

If you also use Gmail as a central mailbox for sending email from multiple email accounts (like me), you will need to add these other email addresses to your Gmail account in Thunderbird by using the Manage Identities feature. When composing an email, you can then select from which address the message will be sent (technically it is sent from Gmail, but the reply-to address will be the one you picked). One nice feature in Thunderbird that is not available in the web based Gmail is the ability to have different signatures for each identity - one more reason you might prefer desktop to web based access.

A lot of people might now stop here. After all, Thunderbird and your web based Gmail are perfectly synched. However, in Thunderbird, if you go to write a new email, there is no auto-complete of all the email addresses you used in the web based interface. The problem is that your Gmail contacts are not accessible from Thunderbird (yet!).

Contacts

This is a tough one. One thing you can do is export your Gmail contacts to a file and import these into your Thunderbird address book. However, this is a completely manual process. For example, if you add new addresses into your Gmail contacts you will need to re-import them into Thunderbird.

One elegant solution is to use GCALDaemon to access your Google contacts from Thunderbird. Notice that I did not say synchronize. If you go with this method, you have probably made a decision to keep your master list of contacts on the web. This is a decision I made because, I want my contacts available to me everywhere, especially when I am away from my desktop. For lack of a better solution, and mostly because of my use of Gmail as a central mailbox, I use my Gmail contacts as my main contact repository.

Thunderbird can access network based contacts via LDAP. Unfortunately Gmail by itself does not provide LDAP access, but GCALDaemon allows you to run an LDAP server locally that can access your Google contacts. Thunderbird can connect to this local LDAP source to get at your Google contacts. How to do this is covered in a GCALDaemon usage guide (assuming you have in fact downloaded and installed GCALDaemon!). Note that steps 1-3 can be skipped, and instead of modifying text based configuration files, you can set everything up in the more user friendly graphical GCALDaemon Config Editor (which can be accessed from your Windows Start menu):

In this window, select the LDAP server tab on the left. Click on the Enable LDAP server and Gmail contact importer label to ensure LDAP will be enabled. Select your Gmail  account. You can press the Account button to add a new Gmail account (it is very simple). Now go back to step 4 in the usage guide to complete the setup in Thunderbird. One last thing, you actually have to start the GCALDaemon server. This is done from the command line (I know - very unfriendly!):

It seems like a lot, but until Gmail provides access to contacts (for example, a nice Thunderbird Add-on would be cool), this is actually a pretty workable solution. Once it is set up, you don't have to do anything.

Managing Contacts

On a related topic, I am wondering what others are doing to manage their contacts. For me, I want to have access from both my desktop and from the web to a single contact list. I am not so sure GMail contacts is the best contact manager (in fact, it seems very under-featured). I am also having an issue with trying to seamlessly synchronize my CardScan contacts with my master Gmail contact list (for now I am doing regular imports into my Gmail contacts from CardScan, although CardScan does synchronize with their free web-based CardScan@Your Service contact manager application). How about Plaxo - anyone using that? It seems you can synch between Plaxo and Thunderbird, but I don't think you can access your Plaxo address book from Gmail.

Popularity: 66% [?]

When I was cleaning out my office, I ended up with a small pile of ticket stubs from sporting events I have attended throughout the years. When you think about it, these things have no real practical use. However for me, and I suspect many others, ticket stubs maintain some real sentimental value like a photograph might have. One idea that came to mind was to put all of these in a dedicated scrapbook, but I figured that would end up just gathering dust on a shelf. This of course begs the question: why not just throw them out? Honestly, that would probably work, but I just could not let go of them...the memories!

Where do we keep photographs these days? If you are like me, they are all stored digitally. In fact, I have gone out of my way to scan old photos so that they can be stored centrally and digitally with the rest of my photo collection. In a moment of epiphany, it occurred to me that I could simply scan my ticket stubs just like I have scanned old photos! Best of all, these images can be organized with the rest of me photo collection in a single place!

As I further processed my pile of papers in my office I came across magazines I had been keeping because of one particular article, or perhaps a specific picture (for example pictures from house & home style magazines that serve as inspiration for an imagined home renovation). I already knew what to do: scan and toss!

On your mission to de-clutter, keep in mind that if you cannot throw stuff out, some things can be stored or organized digitally instead of physically. I know for me, the scan & toss option has been completely overlooked in the past. What do you do to organize your old ticket stubs, magazine articles and similar keepsakes?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Honestly, I thought his last name was Wallace! My interview with Mike Vardy, E.P.E. (part of the EffTD™ Interview Series) is now up on Effing The Dog. Mike and I discuss the "sillosophy" behind the 4-Hour Workweek, personal productivity, meditation and corduroy evening wear. Mike came out swinging and asked some pretty pointed, candid questions. After having my handlers rough him up a little, he became very cooperative and asked much easier questions (that we wrote). Check it out!

By way of some background information, Mike Vardy questions the value of personal productivity and getting anything done and has developed the revolutionary EffTD™ system.

Odds & Ends

The 4-Hour Workweek Journal is now part of the Getting Things Done Feedburner Network - a network of weblogs talking and discussing everything GTD (Getting Things Done), lifehacking and personal productivity. When you thing about it, a four hour workweek is very much about getting things done - so much so that one can be extremely effective while spending a fraction of the time usually spent on work by most.

Popularity: 11% [?]

I have a feeling this guy is not on any kind of information diet! Mr. Gore is not the only one whose workspace has been overtaken by clutter. Up until last week, my office was more of an exercise in entropy than a place to work. After having been inspired by a post in Lodewijk van den Broek's How to Be an Original blog, I set to work a week ago to rid my workspace of clutter.

While I have sought to rid my house of unnecessary clutter, I have had a bit of a psychological block when it came to my office. Subconsciously, I think I have always equated lots of information with intelligence, importance and self value. Basically, in my mind:

Information Overload = Smart Person = Messy Desk

Al Gore's desk reminds me of the work spaces of most of my university professors - stacks of academic journals on their desks, books and papers literally falling out of the bookcases. I think back to one of the most intelligent fellows I have ever worked with in the banking industry: he ran out of horizontal surfaces at arm level, so started piling stuff on the floor! I think over time I just developed this sense that the messier one's workspace, the more important, intelligent and productive they must be...so I set off to replicate that kind of environment.

As luck would have it, experts have recently reinforced my unconscious correlation between messy desks and smart people. In A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, the authors actually argue that a messy desk can be an attribute of an effective worker. As they point out in the book, "Einstein's desk at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, was maintained...in a stupendous disarray." The book suggests that messiness can be related to higher education and higher salaries.

Expert opinions aside, I think my messy office became more a source of stress than a higher salary. All of the papers and files piled on my desk simply suggested things to myself like disorder, incompleteness, and distraction.

My process for cleaning my office pretty much amounted to putting everything in my office into one big pile and processing them one at a time into the following categories:

• Garbage
• Store/archive
• Organize

I'll touch on how I dealt with organization in a later post, but I will tell you it took me a week to get through everything! However, I just wanted to mention that today is Day 1 of my clutter free office! So far, it is mentally refreshing to work without the visual distraction of all that clutter. For inspiration on your own workspaces, check out Unclutterer's Flickr Workspaces Pool. What do you think? Are Abrahamson and Freedman right or did I do the right thing by cleaning up?

Popularity: 9% [?]