like a fire

I use Gmail exhaustively in youth ministry and there are many things that most people don’t know about it. So let’s jump right in.

Gmail is an online email client that has several advantages over most email. First, it catches almost all spam. I rarely get any spam and when I do I just report it as spam and never see it again. The real help though comes in labels. You can attach a label to any email and archive it for future reference. I have labels that are for my church, youth ministry, receipts, my blog, events and anything else that I need to reference a group of emails. Gmail also puts multiple emails into conversations. For example, if I email someone and we email back and forth several times, all of those emails are linked together into a conversation. This is very good for keeping things organized.

Next there is GTDinbox. This is a Firefox plugin that allows you to organize labels, make and review tasks, save searches, send yourself reference and even print tasks to cards. I use this mostly for making task lists. I know that there are many other ways to make task lists, but I check my email constantly through the day, and having those tasks sitting there in front of me helps me to know what needs doing and what doesn’t. I hate going home from work and thinking I didn’t get anything done or enough done. Did I mention that I’m Type A personality?

All this might seem a little over the top, but I feel good at the end of the day knowing that my tasks are complete and that I don’t have to worry about what I forgot to do. I hope this is helping some of you youth guys out there. If you have a system for email, I would love to hear about it.