Geek parent tip: Use Gmail as a baby book

Someday my son will hate me for this, but I just implemented a new way to record his daily achievements: A dedicated Gmail account. I got the idea for this tip from John Girard, CEO of Clickability, who sends tagged emails to his Outlook account. Anything with his special code in the subject means it's news about one of his kids, and he has filters to archive those notes into an offline file.

But it's so easy to set a new Gmail account, I thought, why not just do it this way? Plus, I can give account access to my wife if she wants to see the archive.

You can set up Gmail to forward all emails it receives to another account, which I'm doing as well. This other account is read by a PC-based email client and archived to my hard disk, which is backed up on Carbonite, so if the Gmail account goes offline I still have the emails saved.

I had been using Twitter a bit to record the cute moments of my son's development, but this solution is better: It's more private and more archival.

Of course, one could use this tip for archiving almost anything. Although it's not elegant, it sure is easy.

See also: The Parent Hacks blog.