Enjablog

On my way home from work today, I tried to think back Before Google and remember the lengths to which I had to go in order to keep my life organized.

- Email: Yahoo and VT for personal, downloaded to Outlook before I transitioned to Thunderbird. My address book was never the same after that.
- Calendar: Yahoo and Outlook synced with my PDA (Handspring Edge)… until I switched computers and stopped syncing. Then I had a mix between Outlook, a paper calendar that I sometimes remembered to carry around with me, and my rapidly failing memory.
- Pictures: I have piles of actual photographs, CDs of pictures developed at CostCo years ago, and digital pictures dispersed between a few old hard drives that have never been sorted/labeled/transferred. But all my photos from the past 4 years have been labeled and tagged in Picassa. I’ve even made use of the facial recognition option to mass tag my photos.
- IM: I have at least 6 accounts on AIM, an account on ICQ (is that even around anymore?), Yahoo, MSN… and probably others. And about 3 years ago, I started phasing out friends who didn’t use gtalk. Well, not exactly phasing out. But I stopped using my AIM accounts and anyone who didn’t make the transition pretty much fell off my radar of people to keep in touch with.
- Blog: I was a dedicated Blogger user for a long while until I decided it didn’t provide all the options I wanted. I think that was all resolved soon after I switched to WordPress, but I haven’t really been back to do a proper comparison.
- Documents: Shared documents. *Awesome.* The big one for me here is wedding planning. But I also use this for a professional society — on-going action items, minutes, agendas — school, keeping track of plants, sharing my will, etc. Before? I wouldn’t even bother. But if I were forced to, it would just be emailing documents back and forth with no form of config control.
- Maps: Mapquest, yahoo, paper maps that were out of date and you had to look up using an index and page # & coordinates. Once mapquest and yahoo maps came around, things weren’t so bad, but streetview is just so much better.
- Scholar: Sure, the internet made trips to the library for research mostly unnecessary, but where do you find technical papers? And professional reference materials? This saved me weeks of time on one of my projects last semester.
- Health: First, I had to learn that you had to bring a prescription to the pharmacy and then wait for them to fill it. Then, I learned that you could call in advance and pick it up later. And then there is online re-fill with auto-reminders.

And now my phone… I spent years trying to get my contact lists in order. Switching between email programs and syncing between multiple devices created hundreds of duplicates that I never managed to get back under control. I never knew which email address, phone number, or other contact info was the right one for a person. I’m still having moderate difficulties distinguishing between people’s mobile and home/work numbers, but I’m at least able to contact the person I intended to contact.

I spent one evening going through my gmail contact list using the merge contacts feature and I now have a functional list online, on my home computer, and on my phone — all up to date.

I do have some serious concerns for what will happen to my life and my ability to be a functioning member of society if all my google apps suddenly went away. But until that happens, I can look back fondly on my years of piece-mealing my life together and appreciate how spectacular my life is After Google.