I was recently inspired by a post that Merlin Mann had created on 43 Folders about using a web based mail account as a “punching bag“. Remembering an old skool Gmail tip about keeping notes in your mail account, I thought these two ideas could combine nicely to allow you to use Gmail as a personal journal. I signed up for a new Gmail account called “aw.journal”. (Please don’t mail it, I don’t intend to use it for anything other than what I describe below.)

I mapped out quickly what I wanted my categories to be:

• Blessings: This is a tip I cribbed from the amazing book “Learned Optimism”, by Martin Seligman. Are you upset about something? Are you just feeling down in general? As fast as you can, write out a list of a couple-dozen things that are really great. You’ll feel way more positive
• Flame: I refer you back to the magnificent 43 Folders
• Gripes: negative journal postings. Keep these separate. Why dwell on the negative?
• Ideas: I’m going to be posting on my idea-generating games later. For now, use this whenever you think of something, however ridiculous, that you could refactor down the road into that killer project
• Life: it ain’t work
• Links: some stuff I don’t want to check out at the office, and I don’t want to post to del.icio.us in “_read”. There are all kinds of reasons for this, like it may be NSFW, it might be loud, it might be something you don’t want to push traffic too. That stuff goes here.
• Notes: doesn’t need much explanation. Snippets of stuff I want to keep on hand, but don’t need to go into a more formal knowledgebase
• Site: the birthing place of blog posts. Certainly not getting enough traffic these days, but that will change
• Work: it ain’t life
• YayMe: anytime I get a complimentary message, it gets forwarded to this file

The next step was to create a spreadsheet in OpenOffice. This is my list of contacts for my journal categories. I used three headings: First Name, Last Name, Email. If you need more info, you can follow Google’s instructions.

All these new contacts have the first name “Journal”. As soon as I type “Jo” in the “To” line of a new Gmail message, I see a list of all my Journal categories. Last names correspond with the categories I defined above. Email addresses are “aw.journal+category at gmail.com” (obviously I’ve mucked with this to try and throw off mail harvestors.) Mail servers ignore everything between “+” and “@”, delivering to the username that preceeds the “+”. (Bonus points: clever application of the “+” can help you figure out who’s sending you spam. But again: that’s another story.) I saved this spreadsheet out as a CSV, but left the file open. Its so much easier to copy and paste from this spreadsheet than trying to remember all my categories. I imported the CSV into my contacts, following the instructions at Gmail.

I headed over to the aw.journal account, and created labels and filters for all my categories. You can follow the instructions from Jim’s Gmail Tip, but replace “Notes” with your categories.

… And done. That’s all there is to it. Now anytime you need to write in your journal, pop open a new message in your Gmail account, and type to your hearts content.

The nice thing about this is you’re kind of doing Google a favour. In the brief time I’ve been toying with this hack, I’ve found more keyword ads and related sites I’ve wanted to click on than at any time using my regular account.

The GTD nerds in my readership may already be seeing another application. There’s nothing keeping you from setting up a mail account, and using your contexts for categories. In fact, I’ve been considering creating an “Inbox” category to hold my unsorted to-dos.

UPDATE: In my original post, I neglected to credit the site The Slacker Manager. It was this site that gave me the “Yay Me” idea.