Including synced Google Drive files in Alfred searches

I use Google Drive quite a bit for personal documents and spreadsheets. I have enough there that I want a quicker process than what I had been doing, which was this:

1. Go to Safari (if I'm not already in it)
2. Open a new tab
3. Go to drive.google.com
4. Click on the search box, and type in part of the name of the doc I want
5. Open it

I'm a big Alfred fan, so step one is to remember that I can just type in the domain name in Alfred to safe a few steps. So now I'm at:

1. Cmd-space to open Alfred
2. Type drive.google.com and hit enter
3. Click on the search box, and type in part of the name of the doc I want
4. Open it

Na, I'm lazier than that. What else can I do? I could use the Alfred web search to search my Drive. So that gets me to this:

1. Cmd-space to open Alfred
2. Type "drive the-thing-I-want-to-find" and hit enter
3. Click on the result I want, assuming it's there

This one is a little annoying if I do a few searches to find what I want. Then I end up with multiple browser tabs to close. The fact that it's been in my Alfred config for who-knows-how-long and I never use it tells me it's not the solution for me.

Throughout this, I was wondering why I have these files from Google synced to my laptop, yet they aren't showing in Alfred searches. I checked the "Default Results" screen in my Alfred preferences to see if the Drive folder was being excluded. Nope.

"Documents" is checked, but apparently Alfred (or OS X) isn't treating those Google files as documents. The "Advanced" button always has good stuff behind it, so I clicked on that.

Blank. So, I dragged one type of each file into that window - files with extensions of .gsheet, .gdoc, and even .gmap (custom Google Maps I've saved over the years). If you have presentations or drawings, you'll want to drag those in too.

That was all it took. Now my Google docs are showing up in the normal Alfred results, just like any other file.

1. Cmd-space to open Alfred
2. Type "the-thing-I-want-to-find" until my desired doc is first (or near it).
3. Worst case, I still have to scroll a few items, then hit enter.

So I'm down to 2, maybe 3 steps. In reality, it took me longer to write this post than to actually solve the problem, but I wanted to point out the variations that are possible (and trivial to set up and use) with Alfred. I love that product.

I highly recommend buying a license, not only for the additional features, but also because it's a cheap way to support the company. For about 2x as much, you can be a Mega Supporter, which gets you free lifetime upgrades. For me, that was well worth the cost.

Meeting overload

You know that person who has a question that needs an answer, but thinks the first step is to schedule a meeting? They probably include too many people, don't include an agenda, schedule it for the next time that's convenient for him/her, then get upset when not everyone attends.

Fortunately most people aren't that bad, but that person does seem to exist in most companies these days.

That's the nice, subtle way to deal with the proliferation of meetings set up by the worst offenders.

When I or my teams are especially overwhelmed by meetings, I'll sometimes do these things:

• Reply to the meeting invite asking for a detailed agenda if one isn't already on it
• Empower my team members to decline meetings from a repeat offender when the meeting has no clear purpose or agenda, especially after asking for it.

Wrike created an infographic to help decide when to create a meeting. Check it out, and share when appropriate:


Infographic brought to you by Wrike

My Blank Screen

I think I'm overdue for starting my own blog. It certainly isn't because I think I'll quickly (or ever) get a lot of followers, resulting in tons of side income that'll allow me to just write for a living.

My goal is to write on a regular basis about anything. No specific topics, and "regular basis" is yet to be defined firmly. I'd like to eventually post daily, but weekly is my initial goal.

What do I hope to accomplish by doing this? There are a few things that come to mind:

1. Have a forum to write on my behalf, not on my employer's. I find that I have fewer things I want to write about for my employer than I do for myself. I do realize anything I say here can, and will, be held against me if someone feels like it.
2. Improve efficiency of my writing. By simply writing more, it's more practice and more output to learn from.
3. Force myself to put thoughts into public. It's easy to write emails to a limited audience, or post to limited networks via social platforms like Yammer, Hipchat, or Slack. But throwing ideas out there for anyone to see (eventually) is different for me. I'd like to get more comfortable at that.

I just need to make sure I don't give myself excuses for not doing this. There are no shortage of topics. I can make the time (i.e. each post doesn't need to take me an hour). Don't worry about writing garbage, because it'll happen.

Fred Wilson wrote about his process and challenges of posting daily. I'm not on his level at all, but it's interesting and inspiring to see a regular, high-quality blogger talk about his challenges doing this also.

It'll be interesting to see what else comes of this. Step one, hit "Publish" on this one.