Google Apps has relieved my brain of memory duty. And so far it’s doing a better job than the old brain.
Way better.
Just about all my worldly information is in Google Apps. Google Calendar, GMail, Google Drive, Google Tasks, and the Chrome browser now hold most things I need to know or refer to on any given day.
Accessible at a moment’s notice. Regardless of my location. Searchable by keyword. Anywhere I can get on a cellular or WiFi network.
Paper use is drastically reduced – complete paperlessness is in sight.
No sticky notes. No handwritten notes. (Paper that trickles down to me gets scanned to Drive.)
No flash drive or CDs, either.
Anything I see on the web can be added to Drive in a few clicks.
Everything that goes into Google Apps automatically and instantly syncs through the cloud to my PCs at home and office, the smartphone, and the tablet. Or any public computer that I log onto. So files are never lost, and, they are never out-of-reach.
Even my Ford connects and syncs with Google.
So if I can remember how to log onto Google, I pretty much don’t have to remember anything else.
The downsides?
Some researchers believe that Google dependency might make me slow and stupid.
And lately I do seem to spend more time looking for my keys and my reading glasses. But losing a chunk of my intelligence to heavy Google use doesn’t seem like too great a loss considering the upsides.
Security? Google’s 2-step verification (well-explained here) keeps everything exceptionally secure. (And it turns out my personal Google account has been more secure than taxpayer records at South Carolina’s Department of Revenue.)
Privacy? Please, that’s so 20th-century. And as long as Google stays mostly not evil, I’ll ignore that uneasy feeling I get when adverts in my Gmail account track the topics discussed in my emails…