• 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.

ShareThis

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.

ShareThis

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?

ShareThis

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?

ShareThis

Note: Most of this derives from a comment I had originally made on The Four Hour Trial’s post. Since this system works so well for me, I felt it was worth repeating here.

Here is my system to deal with having multiple email addresses that is almost painless. The real trick was being able to both send and receive email for all of my email addresses from a central inbox.

The Central Inbox

There could be many candidates for a central inbox. If you exclusively access email from the desktop on a single computer, and all of your email addresses can be accessed via POP, your email client, such as Outlook, could serve as your central inbox. I chose Gmail as my central inbox for a few reasons:

• Web and desktop access.
• Superior SPAM protection.
• Superior search capabilities.
• Ability to tag email versus filing email in a folder.
• Lots of storage.

If you choose to use Gmail as your central inbox, you will need a Gmail account. If you are managing the actual domain to which one of your email addresses belongs (for example, you have started your own business or venture), consider setting up Google Apps for your Domain and having Google host that domain’s email. By using Google Apps for your Domain, you will not need to get an additional @gmail.com email address.

Sending Email

You can setup Gmail to send email from all of your email accounts. By the way, this is also possible in many desktop clients as well, but I like using Gmail as my central inbox, so I will be describing the process using Gmail. In your Gmail settings, you simply add your other email accounts to Gmail. This will cause Gmail to send a verification email to your other accounts. You should then access your email at the other accounts the way you have in the past to complete the verification process (basically replying to the verification email proves you are the owner of the email account you are trying to add to Gmail). Once verified, you will be able to send email from your other email accounts from within Gmail.

Receiving Email

Receiving email sent to your other email accounts in the Gmail inbox requires you to either forward those emails to Gmail, or download those emails to Gmail. Forwarding email from all your other accounts into Gmail can be done in a couple of different ways:

• Having your system administrator setup forwarding on the actual email server, forwarding email directly to your Gmail account.
• Most web based email will allow you to setup automatic forwarding of email to another email account. In this case forward to your Gmail account.

Gmail can also act as an email client for other email accounts. Instead of forwarding email to Gmail, you can actually download email into Gmail. There is a setting in Gmail for downloading email from another account into Gmail using POP, much like how you would use Outlook to get email from an email account.

Living The Dream

You can now send and receive email from all of your email accounts using Gmail. Since Gmail supports IMAP, you can use both the Gmail web interface and a desktop email client (like Outlook or Thunderbird) to send and receive email while keeping both in synch.  You can also use POP to download Gmail into a desktop client for offline viewing (selecting the option to keep a copy on the server ensures that you maintain a copy in Gmail).

I understand that some people may be uncomfortable with depending on Google for handling all of their email. Like I said, there are other ways to implement the concept of a central inbox using other tools. I just happen to like Gmail a lot. Gmail provides much more storage than most email providers. As a result I never throw out an email, and I am currently only using 12% of my storage quota! By being able to search through all of this mail using Google search, I can find dated material in a matter of seconds, all the time, no matter where I am. In the end, it might not be absolutely perfect, but this system works really well for me.

ShareThis

The entire keynote address can be viewed on the New New Internet Conference site.

Here is a truism: people do not truly multi-task. Multi-tasking, in my opinion, is usually used to describe switching continuously between multiple single tasks over a period of time. So why not just work on one task at a time to completion, one after another? If we really cannot parallel process, the overall duration of completing all of the tasks is the same whether we do one thing at a time or try to “multi-task”. If you believe, as many do, that there is a task-switching cost associated with any switch from one task to another, then multi-tasking actually takes more time than performing single tasks at a time to completion.

One could then say that they must start one task before completing another because of a deadline. I would agree that a deadline is a practical implication, but it suggests prioritizing work by deadline, not the need to multi-task! In fact, task switching costs suggests that by prioritizing work and single tasking, we have the best shot at meeting these deadlines.

By the way, we often think that computers multi-task. Strictly speaking, for single processor machines, that is not technically accurate. CPU’s work on a single task at a time, and multi-tasking is emulated by having some sort of task switching scheme built into hardware or operating system software. Just like humans, there can be a substantial performance penalty for a computer to task switch.

ShareThis

There is another dimension to elimination, and that is reducing real, physical clutter. This is all the stuff in our homes and workplaces that we don’t really use, at best taking up space, at worse requiring maintenance and attention (leading to more task and mental clutter). A number of years ago, my wife and I moved into a new, larger house. For some reason, as a society, it seems our houses get bigger and bigger, but I digress… The interesting thing about larger spaces: you find a way to fill them up, and that’s exactly what we proceeded to do: our new house just gave us an excuse to buy, collect and store more stuff.

Last summer we realized that our house was actually filling up with junk.  What we were accumulating was often not being used at all. In a stroke of brilliance, we decided we needed to have a garage sale and clear it out. We started going through our house, first in our “storage” areas and then our closets. At first when you are going through your stuff you usually come up with some reason to hold onto it. To get by this roadblock we developed a one year rule: if we have not used something in over one year it was a candidate for our garage sale. As we identified stuff that met this criteria, we staged it inside our garage where we would perform a final decision on whether something stayed or went. The funny thing was just getting things into this staging area ended up being 90% of the battle. Nothing we staged came back inside, and in fact inspired us to identify more items we did not need.

At the end of the day, I spent perhaps a full day of effort between setting up and holding the actual garage sale. I made about $200. It was a great way to meet people in the area and also nice to know that some of our stuff might find use with someone else. Beyond this, there were so many benefits to this exercise:

• There was a lot of stuff that did not even make it into our garage sale and went directly in the trash. The whole thing doubled as a spring cleaning exercise!
• Seeing the sheer volume of stuff that we were willing to part with, all in one spot, made us realize that a lot of things we had bought over the years were really quite unnecessary. We now have a garage sale rule when we are shopping: if there is a chance that at item we are considering might end up in a garage sale, we put it down.
• Freeing up space was actually mentally liberating. We have found that less clutter in our space eliminates a lot of mental distraction.

In the end, the garage sale itself was probably not worth my effort, but the exercise of preparing for it was priceless.  In the future I would either simply donate any items of value to charity, or put it on the curb with a big “Free” sign (a friend tells me he had a big piece of plywood with “Free” spray painted on it that he would regularly use for just such a purpose - ironically the sign itself was also taken by someone!).

This is just a story about a single battle, but the war against clutter still rages with me and others. Resources and tactics:

• Lifehacker (tagged as Clutter)
• Unclutterer
• zenhabits (tagged as Simplicity)

ShareThis