Tools for the ADHD Google User

Sometimes it's hard to tell what's screwing up my thought processes. Is it the ADHD or is it just that at heart I'm still about nine years old? Honestly. Ever watch a baseball game and realize that you're easily old enough to have been Derek Jeter's mother or father? But before that realization you're seeing him as a "grown man" as opposed to your image of yourself as being, maybe, prepubescent? That's me all over.

And as a result, I'm majorly susceptible to gadgets of any kind. It's not just that I think they may have a beneficial impact on my daily life, like deodorant or Concerta or Cheerios. It's the glitter that gets me. Like a baby in a cradle, lying happily on his back watching some dumb mobile twirling around over his face (and let me say now that anyone who exposes his baby to large visual doses of Shrek is out of his mind. Images, images, images, folks.)

Anyway, one of the big purveyors of this mind-candy is, of course, the hand-rubbing, snickering, engineers out in Mountain View, CA, home of Google. I can easily get so lost in thinking about how to configure my iGoogle home page, which widgets and gadgets and doodads and trinkets to embed that I forget the six or seven things I just had to get done.

The latest gizmos come from—allow me to quote—"the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams." One looks inutile for my purposes, one I still don't entirely understand, and one looks like the answer to a prayer. Given all of the problematic aspects of my headworkings mentioned above, I'm always looking to consolidate. iGoogle helps. But let me pose this question: which page, apart from that one that you won't let anyone else see you looking at—c'mon, you know—do you go to the most often? Right. Your email.

If you don't use gmail, you can stop here. Actually, you can stop here and sit down and figure out why you're not. Do you really like the ad-riddled interface of Hotmail? Sheeeesh.

Hang on, I'm almost done (and gimme a break. I haven't done any postings here in ages, and the editorial function is the last one to kick back in [see, Moran and Sebastian, Editorial Implementation in Pathological Bloggers, Edin. Univ. J. of Cognitive Studies, 3.14]).

This latest thing allows you to insert, in your left sidebar, an agenda. A listing of all the events in your Google Calendar. Staring you right in your grill. You can have it display only those calendars (you don't know about this either?) that you wish, as well as a mini-calendar. There it is, folks. Enable this device and your "to-do" list will wash over your retina several, or several dozen, times a day.

Now if they'll come up with a tiny little widget that will give real-time Yankee scores, we'll be all set.