Google Apps Scripts are probably the most useful automation tools I’ve used. They can be used as “excel macros” for Sheets, form processing, and much more. Here I want to share three small scripts I made to improve productivity and task management.
#Mark all emails as read
If you ever got bothered by all archived and still unread emails in Gmail, this script can help you. It is based on the script by Mike Crittenden.
I don’t really need it right now, because I have a filter which marks all incoming emails as read right away:
Matches: larger:1
Do this: Mark as read
But it was effective for cleaning up.
#Tasks recurring randomly for Amazing Marvin
I use Amazing Marvin for task&project management and currently it doesn’t support randomly recurring items. In fact, no app I’ve tried supports that. It’s a shame, because there could be several use cases for that: “spontaneous” cleaning&organizing, fun activities, ideas review.
If you are able to import tasks (for example, via email), you can check this script. The most important thing is a TASKS list. Each item should have range_start and range_end. For example, range_start = 2 and range_end = 9 mean that task will be created in ranges from two to nine days after last created date. E.g. if the last time task with this id was created on September 10, next task will be created sometime between September 12 and September 19.
Script ensures the task will be created at some point during this range, just make sure it’s triggered to run daily.
#Create a task when new package release is available on PyPI
I have a weird project which can start only after a particular release of one python package. It’s not very urgent, so no hurry, but I don’t want to check for releases manually.
This script checks RSS for the package on libraries.io and if there is a new version available, it will send email to AM to create a task.
I didn’t go into details about how to setup these scripts, so if you have any questions, feel free to comment.