I use Gmail as my brain/filing cabinet. Do you use email in unconventional ways?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Using my phone, I frequently email myself all sorts of data for safekeeping that is quickly searchable and retrievable. How about you? Do you use Gmail/email to store stuff, help you remember things, or for other tasks other than emailing? Is there an easier more efficient way to input data, store data, and then search for data?

It seems that people chuckle when I take the paper that they hand me, scan it, send it to myself with some keywords, and then sometimes even hand it right back to them. I’ve tried different apps for note taking/organizing, but they eventually become unwieldy.

Ex: If I meet someone, I send an email to myself with a scan of their card or at least their name and why I need to remember them. I send myself emails about things I need to get at the store. All vet and medical stuff I keep in my email. Links to places and events that my friend’s recommend are also stored there.

I am a guy in my mid 50’s with 4 kids, elderly parents, and I run my own small business. I lose things and I forget stuff all the time!

2

I don’t use Gmail for reminders (I use a shared calendar with my wife for that). But I absolutely use it the other way you do: namely a searchable repository of documents, etc.

I don’t consider it an optimal solution, but I’m too disorganized to do anything more formal. I find it works well enough for my purposes.

3

Yeah Gmail is very handy for storing, categorizing, and retrieving stuff. I have various boxes and labels I apply to messages, such as ToDo, ToVisit, and Notes/Info. The search works very well.

I also find the Snooze and Send Later functions handy to remember stuff. Although I have accumulated way too many Snoozed messages, I finally just put them in the ToDo box when I had snoozed them for probably the 10th week. Guess the tasks weren’t so important after all.

4

Yeah, I do all those things too. My favorite part is that I can read my email reminder, and if I’m not ready to take care of it just yet, it is very easy to “mark unread.” I also use Google Calendar, but that’s mostly for things that have to happen at a specific time, rather than reminders that I just want to keep handy for an as-yet-undetermined time.

5

I email certain documents to myself as an offsite backup - though with Yahoo, not Gmail.

6

I scanned my driver’s license, passport and eyeglass prescription and emailed them to myself, on my Gmail account. That way, if I’m out of town, I can get to them if necessary.

7

At work I get roughly 3000 emails per day.

About 10% of them actually need to be read.

I have a vicious set of inbox rules and search folders to manage them.

Any kind of alert or notification from an automated internal system, or anything message sent to a distro that I am a member of but where I am not on the To: or CC: line gets immediately filed to a folder that I rarely look at. I have People to review all that shit on a daily basis.

Search folder #1 is anything from my boss, his peers, my grandboss, great-grandboss, or most recent former boss. (~10 per day)

Search folder #2 is anything from my directs, dotteds, cross functional peers, and key upstream people at vendors I depend on. (~30 per day.)

Search folder #3 is anything from any of the leads on the internal teams that are customers of my team. (~30 per day)

Search folder #4 is anything from my indirects. (~50 per day)

Search folder #5 is automated reports that I’ve set up in Jira or VSTS or ServiceNow or whatever to explicitly send to myself for daily review. (~20 per day)

Search folder #6 is meeting invitations. (~15 per day, of which I accept roughly 3)

Search folder #7 is anything not covered by the above with the ! flag set (~5 per day.)

I triage all of this shit 2-4 times per day, tag anything that needs a response or further mental cycles with the Follow Up flag, and do my best to respond to all of the flagged messages within 24 hours.

Over the years I’ve made a few half-hearted stabs at saving important stuff in OneNote, but the volume is just too much. These days I’ve resigned myself to just leaving important emails in my inbox and searching for them later, and to saving any important personal notes in a BATF that I can easily search.

Before I started this particular role, I spent a lot of time composing detailed, logically consistent, grammatically correct emails. These days, most of my emails are ten words or less. “Yep.” “No. Next Tuesday.” “Go for it.” “Sounds good.” “Think that’s in the plan for next quarter.”

It still beats the shit out of Skype or Slack.