How to Get SMS Alerts for Gmail via Twitter

How do you get SMS notifications on your mobile phone for important emails in your Gmail? Google doesn’t support text notifications for their email service but Twitter does. If we can figure out a way to connect our Twitter and Gmail accounts, the Gmail notifications can arrive as text on our mobile via Twitter. Let me explain:

Twitter allows you to follow any @user via a simple SMS. They provide short codes for all countries (see list) and if you text FOLLOW to this shortcode following by the  username, any tweets from that user will arrive in your phone as text notifications. For instance, if you are in the US, you can tweet FOLLOW labnol to 40404 to get my tweets as text messages. Similarly, users in India can text FOLLOW labnol to 9248948837 to get the tweets via SMS.

The short code service of Twitter can act as a Gmail SMS notifier. You create a new Twitter account, set the privacy to private and this account will send a tweet when you get a new email in Gmail. Follow this account via SMS from you main Twitter account and the SMS notifications will start pouring in.

Use Twitter as a Gmail Notifier with Google Scripts

Here’s a step by step guide on how you can use Twitter to get SMS notification for important email in your Gmail account. It will take a minute to setup and, internally, there’s a Google Apps Script that’s doing all the magic. It monitors your Gmail mailbox in the background and as soon as a new message arrives in your account, the script sends out a tweet.

1. Log out of your existing Twitter account and then go to twitter.com/signup to create a new Twitter account for your Gmail account.
2. Confirm your email address, then open the Twitter settings page and check the option “Protect My Tweets.” This will make your Gmail notifications private and neither search engines nor other Twitter users will be able to see tweets generated through Gmail.
3. Click here to copy the Google Sheet and choose Authorize under the Gmail to Twitter menu (near Help). Remember to authorize with your new Twitter account.
4. Once authorized, choose Start from the Gmail to Twitter menu and enter your Gmail search query. For instance you can say is:important is:unread in:inbox newer_than:1d to only receive notification for new, unread and important emails in your Gmail. Click OK.

That’s it. The Gmail notifier is running and it will tweet when a matching email is found. It runs every 10-15 minutes and will only work on incoming email, not the old message. The messages will also be logged in the Google Sheet so you know what’s happening behind the scene.

Get SMS Alerts for Emails at Gmail

Open a new browser session in Incognito mode, log in to your old Twitter account and send a follow request to your new Gmail account on Twitter. Approve the new follower request and you should now see tweets for new Gmail messages, as they arrive, in your main Twitter timeline.

Should you wish to receive SMS alerts on your mobile phone for new Gmail messages, just open the Twitter profile page of your Gmail bot and turn on Mobile Notifications. This will obviously work only if you have connected (and verified) your mobile phone with your main Twitter account.

Also see: How to Write a Twitter Bot

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The story, How to Get SMS Alerts for Gmail via Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 31/10/2015 under GMail, Sms, Twitter, Internet.

How to Get Things Done with Trello

My work involves prioritizing, organizing and managing tasks, information and ideas. I have tried hundreds of todo lists and project management tools to get the job done but finally settled on using Trello. It is now my swiss knife where I do everything from collaborating with my wife on shopping lists to building products for my company to teaching students to writing a book.

Trello provides a very flexible way to do this all and it has a whole ecosystem of apps and extensions to make your life simpler. If you are new to Trello, here’s a getting started guide that will help you understand the basics of Trello and how you can use the service to manage work and get things done.

What is Trello and why I need it?

Trello is like a todo list on steroids. At the core of it is a card which is the fundamental unit of information and it can be around lists. Here is a simple Trello card. It has a title with something I plan to do in the near future.

What follows is more complex Trello card containing a title, description (optional), file attachments (you can even pull files from Dropbox or Google Drive), comments from other people and a variety of things including checklists and tags. Each card as a unique email address and you can add comments to the card by simply sending a message to that address.

Product Management with Trello

You can make a card as simple or as complex as you want. The cards are then organized into flexible lists. The lists show a preview of various cards and you can click on them to view details. The list stores all related cards.

In this example, each card in the Trello list corresponds to a feature I was building for a product. The lists are then grouped into boards. The board is effectively a project. If you take a look at my product board below, you’ll see lists like Backlog, In Implementation, QA, Questions and Finished.

I see this as an assembly line to make products. I create a Trello Card for each feature or idea and add to the Backlog list. The team would discuss and add further details to each card. Then the developers would drag individual cards to the In Implementation list and once the task is complete, it is shifted to the QA list. The testers would then move it to Finished once it has passed all the necessary checks.

Each of my projects would have a board like this and you can do a lot of cool things with that. For instance, I use the Pomello extension to pick up a task from Trello and start working on it. It will calculate the time taken and prompt me to take a break every, say, 25 minutes.

The cards work great in team settings and help the whole team to understand who is working on what and they can also keep a track of the status of tasks. Of course, there are more powerful project management tools out there, but none as simple and as extensible as Trello.

Getting Things Done with Trello

I’m a fan of the Getting Things Done method and here’s how I manage my time with Trello using GTD approach. You can download my Trello template for the GTD board here.

Whenever an email arrives, or there’s a task I need to complete or when an idea pops up in my mind, I create a new card in the “Inbox” list of my Trello board. Once a day, I “triage” them (decide the priority) to move into one of the 4 buckets.

• If it is something I’m waiting for someone else to do, I will move it to the “Waiting” list.
• If it is something that is not mandatory or urgent, say I want to read the new GRR Martin’s novel or call my uncle, I move it to the “Someday/Maybe” list.
• If there is a set time for a task, like tax filing or submitting a paper to an event, I move that card to “To Calendar” and assign a due data to the card. You can easily link Google Calendar to your Trello list using the iCal feed.
• If a card doesn’t fall in any of the above buckets and I really have to do it, I move it to the “Need to do” list.

Every morning, I take the most important cards from the “Need to do” list and move it to the “Today” list. These are the things I plan to get done today. If the “Need to do” list is clear, then I move a couple of pending cards from the “Someday/Maybe” list at the end of the day and handle those cards. Any unfinished task at the end of the day must be moved back to the respective lists.

If you can dump your mind into the “Inbox” list, you can have much better clarity in what you do.

Trello for Book Writing

Here is a partial view of my Trello board of my book on Indian history – “From Tryst to Tendulkar”. I use the board to organize my chapters, ideas, references and everything else.

Trello for Teaching a Class

I teach classes for entrepreneurs, product managers, business school aspirants and civil participants on various methods to study. Here is a screenshot of my Trello board for a class for business school aspirants.

Trello for Shopping

My wife and I share a Trello card with all the things to buy. Either one of us puts stuff there and when one of us goes shopping, the card becomes our shopping list. As I pick up stuff in the supermarket, I also check the item in the Trello card. When my wife needs that stuff again, she simply unchecks the checked item. Thus, we don’t need to keep adding existing stuff to the card.

Balaji Viswanathan is a product manager by profession, he writes a blog, created Be Limitless (a popular Chrome add-on), wrote a book on Indian history and is considered a rockstar on Quora. His favorite GTD tool is Trello.

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The story, How to Get Things Done with Trello, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 31/10/2015 under Productivity, Internet.