Guide To Google Drive
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Guide To Google Drive
Paying attention to the things you love is an underrated way to get to know yourself
This piece is part of How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier
Right now, in a Google Doc under the heading “Things I Love,” I have the following list: velvet couch pillows. Leopard accessories. Rosy lip gloss. Pastel crocs. I wish I were joking about that last one, but I’ve lingered over enough targeted ads for those rubber shoes to accept the truth.
The Doc is a catch-all for items I’ve come across during trips to the store, during idle online browsing, or while scrolling social media — less a premeditated shopping list, more a brain…
Guide To Google Drive
There are valuable clues hidden in your romantic history
This piece is part of How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier
As a teenager, I imagined my adult dating life would go something like this: Meet man. Marry. The end. Trial and error was for losers. Dating was for doubters. By my exacting metric, any time spent with someone I knew wasn’t a match was a waste of time.
Like many teenagers, I did not know what I was talking about. The “trial and error” element of dating hasn’t been a waste of time at all; it’s been an essential part of growing up, and…
Guide To Google Drive
How to process the memories that live on our devices
This piece is part of How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier
If you’ve ever been in a product design meeting, you know that often, it’s impossible to predict all the ways a piece of technology will be used once it’s out in the world. Human experience is too variable.
I’d bet, for example, that Google’s product team didn’t have “grief management” as a use case on their whiteboard for Google Drive, but that’s exactly what I used it for.
I met Greg when I moved to Chicago for graduate school. We had an intense, whirlwind…
Guide To Google Drive
How tracking all my professional setbacks made me less afraid of them
This piece is part of How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier
When things are tough, it’s tempting to look back on earlier parts of our lives through a nostalgia-tinted lens, forgetting that we’ve ever experienced any previous setbacks. Luckily for me, though, I’ve made it impossible to forget just how many times I’ve failed.
When I first left my full-time media job and went freelance, I started a Google Sheet of all my story pitches for articles that never landed anywhere. Next to each rejected pitch I note the outlet I pitched it to, plus…
Guide To Google Drive
Managing the logistics of death can also be a way to heal
This piece is part of How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier
I’m a spreadsheety kind of person by nature. The tidy progression of columns and rows is comforting to me. Maybe that’s why a spreadsheet was one of the first things I made after my mother died.
My sister and I faced the difficult task of figuring out what to do with our mother’s beautiful house. My mother, who worked hard for every dollar she ever spent, had collected a perfectly gorgeous and bewildering array of framed art, pretty objects, handsome furniture, and lovely clothes…
Guide To Google Drive
Make new friends, but sort the old ones into a 15-tier spreadsheet
This piece is part of How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier
First I organized my spices. Then I organized my friends.
In the early days of the pandemic, facing a glut of alone time and not yet numbed to the chaos, I resolved to get my shit together. Besides alphabetizing my spices, I Kondo’d my socks and cleaned the grout in my shower. I filed away over 200 items in the “Miscellany” folder on my computer — the doodad drawer of desktops. But I still felt no peace.
Guide To Google Drive
The ultimate self-improvement tool is something you already have
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. …
Guide To Google Drive
When life feels too busy to connect to something bigger, open your laptop and type
This piece is part of How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier
Every once in a while, when I’m carrying a mental load that feels too heavy to bear on my own, I power on my computer and start a Google Doc. Dear God, I type, in Garamond for good measure. I’m sorry it’s been so long.
It’s a method of prayer that would have felt utterly bizarre to me not that long ago. I spent years believing that having God in my life meant living up to a very exacting ideal — a belief I…
