I’m up to 28 active days on Gemini at work in the past 28 days, so ✅ for me on that. That is up from 8 active days the prior 28-day period, not because I wasn’t “using AI,” but because I didn’t care to use Gemini. Anyhow, I set out on a concerted effort to figure out Gemini in particular, and that led to me learning a lot more about Google Workspace in general.

I’ve never felt in sync with Google’s whole ecosystem. I have a lot of appreciation for GMail as a standalone product. I’m so used to Google Calendar at this point that I’m resistant to anything that doesn’t act like it, but I don’t really calendar my personal life. I tolerate Drive, hate Slides, get along with Docs, and have developed a grudging respect for Sheets. Meet has gotten better over the years. Tasks is super simplistic and its apps are bad, but I’m going to get back to it. Keep – I’ve never stuck with it.

But being under a mandate to use AI in prescribed tools, I sat down to a Gemini prompt and started poking around. You can give Gemini the run of your Google Workspace stuff with one configuration switch. So I enabled that and started playing. As with anything like this, I started with the calendar because I’m in that more than any other app during the day.

The integration with Workspace apps is faster than any MCP that offers the same integration via Gemini CLI. It’s quick to tell you what your day looks like, and Gemini tries to be helpful with interpretation, looking out for opportunities to optimize or figure out when the best work might be squeezed in between events. I put together a custom Gem named “Hecubus” that helps with day and week planning. I can’t see myself using it regularly (though I might if Gemini on the desktop had a live mode that allowed me to dialogue with it as I poke at emails and invitations and skim documents).

And calendar wrangling … I dunno. It’s a natural use case, and there are a million AI apps to help with that now, but I think they probably work better with less dense calendars. Given some up-front work to provide Gemini with more context about my priorities I might eventually leverage it more to help with a hectic week, but it’s just easier at this point to work it out myself. That one year I had an EA was pretty nice.

Keep ended up being more interesting than I expected. I’ve known a few Keep adherents, but I could never get past the way it presents like Post-It notes — which are finite things — but allows them to be bottomless. The thing is, Gemini understands them and can search them quickly, so they’ve got a potentially powerful place in the ecosystem as little nuggets of context you can farm. I experimented with hijacking Basic Memory’s knowledge format and Gemini did an okay job understanding “relationships” and “observations.” Gemini also responds well to just being told a fact about something you have a note about in Keep and adding it without needing an exact title.

In terms of personal organization, the mind-meld between Gemini and Keep is promising in a way that Apple is not managing with Siri and Notes. For instance, Gemini in Live mode responded perfectly (and predictably) when I’d put a bottle of wine in front of the camera and say “add this to my wine list, I got it at Bread and Roses” perfectly transcribing the label and adding it to the right list. Likewise, it ingested a bunch of products I showed it, and then knew how to respond to spoken queries about which beard shampoo is in my products list. Next time I’m at Bread and Roses, I’ll experiment with a Live Mode query to tell me which wines I can pick up there.

Years and years ago I had an Emacs extension called “remembrance agent.” Its whole schtick was that it would vectorize your documents then hang around monitoring a small context window around the point in the current buffer, suggesting a list of related documents you could jump to. I always liked the very ambient way that worked. I’ve struggled a lot more with systems that are about deliberate maintenance of a taxonomy — I’ve struggled with systems in general — but I can totally live with my main Keep window being generally clear of non-archived notes, and just quietly hucking bits of data into Keep’s weird little tesseract Post-Its, where they just go live in the Gemini Overmind as knowledge loam. I’m not trying to write 70 books here, I’m just trying to remember where I bought that one good beard balm, and which scent it was, or what the dimensions of all the windows in the house are.

While I was trying to learn more about how Google Workspace hangs together I came across this productivity guy/ex-Googler who is all in on Google stuff and built a “Capture, Organize, Review, Engage” workflow using Tasks and Keep. He gave me the idea to keep the Keep “desktop” fairly clean, and he also drew all the connections between Tasks and everything else in the Google Workspace ecosystem. There are hooks between Tasks and Mail, Docs, and Keep that are super useful. If you’re in that stuff all day, the case to not move to Tasks is a hard one to make because every Task you add from those tools includes a link back to the originating tool for instant recall of the context. (Gemini also labels Keep notes it creates with a little Gemini icon that takes you back to the chat session it came from.)

Anyhow, that all has less to do with Gemini and more to do with Google’s integration game, which is stronger than I realized a month ago. But Gemini is able to leverage or access all of it quickly and effectively.

The net effect of the past 28 days has been that I have largely migrated to Tasks for day-to-day work organization. It is the simplest todo system I can imagine outside Markdown checklists in terms of its up-front functionality and curb appeal, but it is omnipresent in my tools, and its simplicity is a real strength: Less systeming, more capturing, but the capturing is to concrete things, not abstract ideas that never get turned into an action or an outcome. The thing it doesn’t do well is maintain focus on projects, but I’m getting great support from the ops team at work to use Jira more consistently and effectively. Anything that ascends to the level of an epic starts generating messages about things assigned to me, and they get turned into Tasks that link back to the thing that generated the message.

Personally, it is much more useful to me to have all this stuff under one roof. I have my individual beefs with each component, but the integration is too good to ignore.

On the AI front, in my ideal world I would probably be happier using Claude with faster MCPs. Gemini itself is good, but Claude Desktop and Web are better, and Claude knows how to use MCPs, which makes it more versatile. But Gemini’s deep interlock with all these daily tools makes it easy to get over in a work context.