Illustration: Simo Liu

Guide To Google Drive

How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier

The ultimate self-improvement tool is something you already have

Forge
Published in
94 min readOct 7, 2020

--

I’m a little intense about Google Drive.

Through years of hyper-organized experimentation with the suite of apps that includes Sheets and Docs, I’ve developed systems to streamline and simplify, well, pretty much everything in my life. Grocery shopping. Holiday gift-buying. Parenting. Financial planning. My freelance project ideas. Even my love life!

Is your Google Drive doing all it can for you? Maybe you just use it to store files, or as free writing software. But it can do so much more. Used well, it can remove the friction that stands between your life and the best, most rewarding version of it.

This long and detailed guide—essentially, a short reference book—will walk you through dozens of ways that you can use Google Drive to bridge that gap. It’s full of specific ideas and templates, many of them borrowed from my life and the lives of other writers, that you can use to solve a very wide range of problems. Here you’ll find step-by-step advice on using all the tools of Drive to do everything from project planning to having a more rewarding social life.

How to use this guide

The table of contents below will give you an idea of what this guide covers. You don’t have to read it all the way through to get its benefits; it’s designed for skimming and dipping into the sections most useful to you. As a whole, it lays out how Google Drive can become the circulatory system for your entire life online, improving not only the way you work, but the way you do everything else, too.

Using Drive this way doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t need to be particularly tech-inclined to do it. To use a kitchen analogy, Google Drive isn’t baking, where one imprecise step can make your cake collapse; it’s cooking, where a little improv can lead to a delicious dinner. Consider the use cases covered in this guide to be your starting recipes, and modify accordingly.

⚒️ The same goes for the templates and samples provided throughout, marked with a ⚒️. (These are view-only, but you…

--

--

Alexandra Samuel
Forge
Writer for

Speaker on hybrid & remote work. Author, Remote Inc. Contributor to Wall Street Journal & Harvard Business Review. https://AlexandraSamuel.com/newsletter