You can also apply these methods to Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other mail client with some similar features. Let’s jump right in!

Writing a diary

Gmail is almost built for this function in a sense. It is private, it can store as many entries as you want, you can categorize using labels, everything is there to make this a great diary application.

Each day, start a new email draft in the morning and either write everything that happened to you that day when you get home in the evening, or add to it as the day goes by. When you’ve written all there is to say, you can save the email, or better yet, send it to yourself.

The great thing about this method is that it allows you to amend any comments, or your friends to comment on an entry too. Just reply to an entry and send it to yourself again to add some additional thoughts, or send the whole message to a friend to get his/her comments. This way all the comments will stay in one thread, so you will have a very organized diary indeed.

Plus, you get all the categorization and search features Google offers you. You can use labels to add your emotional state (happy, sad, etc.) or you can categorize as usual, highlighting the main events of the day.

Keeping your diet

You can also use the power of Gmail to manage your diet and take a look at how many calories you consume daily. This is helpful because you can dedicate a whole inbox to this subject and you can keep track of your progress on a daily (or even more frequent) basis.

I recommend either adding a new message for each meal you ate, or adding one each day. I would write what I ate, ingredients, how it made me feel, was it necessary, and all the additional info you need in the message body, and write the calorie count in the subject. This would give me at a glance info about my consumption if I take a look at the inbox.

You can use labels to flag all the days where your consumption was good, and to highlight the ones where it was not so great. You can also create labels for the amount you consume. Create one for 500-700, 700-1000, 1000-1400, 1400-2000, etc. You can then easily switch to view all the days where you were in these specific regions.

Book & Movie Organizer

Gmail can also help you organize your Books and Movies, or indeed any other items you have a collection of. If we take Books as an example, you can create a new email for each book you have. Type the book title, author and ISBN in the subject, this will help you sort and search very easily later on.

You can write a short synopsis of the book, along with any other info, like publisher and so on in the body, plus you can include an image from Amazon to accompany it. Just we did with the diary you can write down your opinion, your review and so on as replies to that email. You can also send the email off to your friends to get their opinion on the book.

You can create emails for books you would like to read, which will come in handy when you’re shopping (you already have a list of titles with ISBNs you would like), and when you want to decide which one to get (you can send them off to friends who have read them to get their take on the book).

Labels can be used well to mark the genre of each book, but you can also use them to indicate whether you liked a book or not. If you also enter books you would like to read later on, you should also assign a label to separate them from books you have already read.

Google’s search will give you a great way to sort through your collection, all you need to do is enter the title or the ISBN and you have it already. I for one read good books multiple times and I have approximately 30 Terry Pratchett books. Selecting which one to read (again) is no easy task, and this system helps me, and could help you too.

Note Taker & Task Manager

Nowadays when we have Google Notebook, Remember The Milk, Todoist, Zoho Writer or Adobe Buzzword we have quite a few note taking and management goodness apps at our fingertips, but I like to keep things simple and integrated, so I came up with a system to use Gmail for taking notes and managing tasks.

Basically there are two types of emails, a note or a task. Notes are assigned the label “note”, tasks are left without a label. I keep adding notes and I use other labels to categorize them (personal, work, website design, etc), the main thing is to separate needed and not needed notes. If a note becomes unimportant I just delete it, or archive it, depending on the contents. Make sure the subject is to the point and short, so you can sort through your notes in a jiffy.

Tasks are mainly managed using the Gmail Superstars system, which can be enabled in the settings under Google Labs. It replaces the usual Gmail stars with an assortment of different icons like a green tick, or a red exclamation mark. I use the normal star, the blue star, the exclamation mark and the tick to indicate the status of a task.

If I enter a task and it needs my further attention until I can start work I slap the yellow star onto it. If I am waiting for someone else’s input to get it going I apply the blue star. The exclamation mark is used when I need to work on a task and the tick is used to mark finished tasks.

This method enables me to have an inbox where I just keep notes and tasks. All the methods we talked about above like sending a task to someone to get their opinion and so on still apply, you can add more using threads, and of course you have the all powerful search available.

Conclusion

While Gmail is not a management system or a CMS, it can do a pretty good job of organizing anything really. It won’t beat some top notch systems, and is NOT a better note taker than Google Notebook, or other services, but if you just need simplicity and ease of access, these uses may be for you. let us know if you use your Gmail inbox for some weird stuff!

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The basics behind Penzu is that it aims to merge all the goodness of a real life diary, and all the usefulness an online format can offer. The first thing you’ll notice for example is that you are writing on “real paper”, a ruled, margined notepad, which resembles a real notebook, so you have the feel of writing in real life. At first I thought this would be a bit obtrusive, but I felt right at home after the first line and it looks quite cool too.

Writing with Penzu

Right now Penzu doesn’t offer all that much in customization and settings, but it’s on the way. In the settings section you will be able to change the font, the size and so on. It would be nice if you could even change paper type in the future, since the application’s main visual feature is this. I’m guessing it may be implemented soon.

The writing experience the application offers however is very rewarding, creating your first online diary page is just like doing it in real life. Of course you don’t have the freedom you would on a real piece of paper, but the ability to add images spices things up a bit. These images are inserted in thumbnail format on the margin and when you hover over them with the mouse you can see the large image and the caption. Again, this takes away from the freedom, but is a very unique approach and one that fits the format very nicely I think. It allows you to create highly organized pages.

Sharing is again implemented very well and goes very well with the notebook theme. Rather than inviting people to view your page or pages, you can send them the page via email. This means that the recipient gets a link to a page on Penzu’s site where they can view that page and that page only, without any connection to your other pages. I think this seems a bad move in today’s sharing web 2.0 world, but is a great solution for an application like Penzu. If you want to show someone a page in your diary you either show it personally or photocopy the page, you don’t send them your whole diary and tell them the page they should look at do you?

Managing your pages

You can manage all your pages by going to the ‘my entries’ tab. There are basic options available for renaming, selecting and deleting, but the main feature here is the search option. It is a ’search as you type’ box, so as you type something your results will pop up automatically. This is a great way to search through all your pages, especially if you actively use Penzu, which means 365 pages a year if you follow strict “diary guidelines”.

These basic features suffice, the only thing I would add is tags and categories. This is a feature which helps you categorize and group pages, it would be nice to be able to list pages where your mood was sad, or happy, or neutral, where you talk about books, movies or your love life.

Should you use Penzu?

My overall impression of it was very good. The application is obviously at its early stages of development so I wouldn’t necessarily say that lack of features is a huge problem. For the target audience the already implemented features are 70% enough I would say. The only things I would need badly are tags, categories and some design change options. I am confident these will happen, since the framework is actually very good. There is an option to save a note, but they are saved about every 10 seconds seamlessly as you type. The search function is awesome too and the site design is just as it should be, a great job in all respects.

There are limitations however, as this application is not meant (and never will be) for people to share their stuff widely. If you need a personal diary application though you will find Penzu very helpful and easy to use, but if you need collaborative power and awesome arrays of advanced features you should look elsewhere. I have only seen a few other diary applications so if you know a different cool one please let us know and I’ll take a look at them.

“Daniel changes his signature lines all the time because although he has a blog about organization, Hack Your Day, he can be a bit all over the place at times. He also has a Blog management service called Blogtastique which helps newbie and pro bloggers in anything they need.”

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