Okay, so for anyone who hasn’t seen the announcement, Google have done something that is potentially very cool… a new feature called Priority Inbox (video and analysis in Freelance Advisor).

I don’t have it yet (which means I reserve judgement until I’ve tried it!), but it appears to be a very effective way of keeping important emails right in front of your eyes, based on the people you are closest too. (I’ve loved the idea of having a “team mate focus” button in Gmail for a while now… I’m hoping this will achieve that).

Does anyone who uses it have any thoughts on how it will work with ActiveInbox?

My hunch is that it’s like having another “Multiple Inbox” to create a Dashboard view of everything going on in your Gmail, but rather than helping you keep an eye on a specific Status label, it combines many actioned emails from important contacts.

Or perhaps it’s just a good way to ensure you don’t miss important emails as they enter your inbox. Something you could check on a more frequent cycle (e.g. if you empty your full inbox twice a day; you might check & process your Priority Inbox once an hour).

Perhaps there is a way to be smarter than that, and I’m all ears if you have one…

Hi guys,

Recently, in the Community Forum, quite a few people have been requesting introductory videos to help them get started with ActiveInbox.

I wondered – especially if you’re a recent new user who has just learnt the ropes, or someone who is also curious in learning something – what you thought would make a good video to teach the concepts of AIB?

It doesn’t need to be much – just the absolute basics, quick, and quite upbeat (show the interesting stuff).

Ideas / requests welcome in the comments

Status Buttons Are Back!

When we originally removed the status buttons (Next/Action/Waiting On/Some Day) from the conversation view, it was because we hoped to make the interface slicker. We admit we may have been slightly off course with that one, as it quickly became obvious that the buttons were a very powerful visual indicator as to the state of the email (not to mention only a single click to operate!).

But nonetheless, we are committed to a very tidy interface. So we’ve compromised, kind of. It’s a compromise where we still believe the choices are limited to very good options!

You will now notice, on the Horizontal Action Bar (please note: if you reverted back to the ‘Classic Horizontal Action Bar’ in the Preferences, you need to disable that and re-enable the modern ‘Horizontal Action Bar’), there is a cog icon. If you click this, you can start re-arranging the Horizontal Action Bar to suit your needs. The most obvious of which is to “Show Status buttons”. Feel free to click things to experiment… they will change before your eyes and no lasting damage can be done

Previous Emails Is Refreshed

One feature we absolutely adored when we originally added it, but completely undersells itself, is “Previous Emails”: the ability, when you reply, to instantly see your conversation history with a person.

To make amends – which is to say, to make it more easy to use – we’ve updated the “Previous Emails” link to be bold if there are previous emails, and to actually show the number of previous emails. So now it’s very obvious to know that you at least HAVE a history with a person, without having to click anything

A little ahead of schedule (or rather, just in the nick of time!), ActiveInbox has been patched up to work properly with the new changes to Gmail.

Everything works but is, in my personal opinion, a little cluttered (even the base Gmail UI, without ActiveInbox, is cluttered). I think in the next few weeks Pete & I will have to get the paint stripper and rolling brush out and give it a proper touch up.

But for now, I’m going to focus back on the next proper release, speak (very) soon!

PS You can grab ActiveInbox 3.1.0.11 from www.activeinboxhq.com/install.html, or wait for Chrome/Firefox to auto update (Chrome will generally update nearly immediately, Firefox can take a few days).

We’re working on getting an update our for the latest Gmail update (it’s a big one!) in the next few hours, we should have something before 14:00 GMT 11/08/2010.

Thank you for all your emails on this – we will send out personal responses as soon as the new release is complete

Hi guys,

ActiveInbox 3.1.010

I’ve just released ActiveInbox 3.1.0.10 to handle some recent problems with ActiveInbox:

• The Archive/Delete button is now working smoothly again, and able to move forward/back through your emails (caused by a Gmail tweak – thank you to everyone who reported it)
• The #103 error that affected some users in Firefox has now been resolved (that was a real pain!)

I recommend everyone upgrades, and if you wait a day or two it will happen automatically (if you want it now, you can grab it from www.activeinboxhq.com/install.html).

Improved Help Guides & Tips

Over the last month a lot of energy has gone into the new website: http://www.activeinboxhq.com. Most usefully of all is the brand new ActiveInbox Workflow guide at http://www.activeinboxhq.com/better_gmail.html. (We still have some more tips to put in there, but it’s pretty much a “best of” of everything we’ve learnt about email in the last few years).

What’s next?

We are full steam ahead with product development! I want to put a proper road map up, but briefly:

• Improve speed in Firefox (Chrome is whippet fast right now – I highly recommend it!)
• Get the Status buttons back in horizontally, I know a lot of you miss that.
• Generally increase efficiency in implementing the workflow. We have collated lots of feature requests and laid them out next to our own plans for features, and there’s so much to do – we love it! (We will move slowly though, as a huge part of what we’re trying to do is stay minimalist, to focus only on what really matters).

I always like the opportunity to say thank you, this time it is a thank you to everyone who is talking to us in email and on the Community Forum: your feedback is hugely valuable, and all getting synthesized into future improvements!

I’ve got a little technique I want to share, that I’ve found very effective lately.

The role of Project labels isn’t always obvious, especially in email. For more casual users, especially if they use multiple task managers, it doesn’t make sense to track their “main projects” in Gmail (the emphasis is on the things they understand as “projects”, in the sense of “this is a work project”).

But the great weakness in email is not ‘email overload’ – I don’t believe it exists in a pure sense – but the fact that email is an open “catch all”. It is so simple, and used by absolutely everybody, that it becomes the obvious choice for communicating about ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. So there’s not an overload of email, there is simply no focus in email.

In a very real sense, projects partition emails into manageable “streams”. In full GTD, a project is not a “thing” in itself – it’s not well defined – it’s a group of related tasks that are not yet finished. You might think you have a project to “refurnish the kitchen”, but actually its a set of related tasks that keep going until you run out of tasks. The project doesn’t end, the tasks do.

So far this might be very obvious to you! But I think it’s a very powerful idea. And for those of you who are saying “yeah yeah, get on with it”, I hope I have an interesting next level for you

There are many different types of conversation, and some conversations are so identifiable that they can be defined by the common path they take. A pipeline, if you will.

For example, in customer service, you 1) receive a request, 2) reassure that person you have heard them, 3) find out more details about the problem to try and find a solution, 4) tell that person the solution.

And for public relations, for a specific announcement, you might 1) Tell a member of the press the announcement, 2) get a reply asking more information or at least acknowledging it, 3) get confirmation they’ve written about it.

The pattern is so precise that you can codify it to repeat it. For example, I use the label format:
P/PR/<Campaign>/1) Contacted
P/PR/<Campaign>/2) Responded
P/PR/<Campaign>/3) Written

I then move each individual conversation through these pipelines.

There’s all manner of reasons why you’d do this – to educate a team about company processes, to ensure every contact is satisfied by your response (in the customer service example), to keep things moving forward to your goal (in the case of PR).  And ultimately, for an overall sense of control & flow.

Implementing this is trivial with ActiveInbox; just use the number/bracket prefix on a label to order it.

There are two broad approaches depending on how well defined something is.

1) With something like the PR campaigns, it is a campaign, so you can create the necessary labels and reuse them a lot. The same example again being P/PR/<Campaign>/<Step>. More generically, this is P/<Type>/<Name>/<Step>. (The emails are mostly outbound).
2) With customer service the problems cannot be predicted. So, you give a project label for the problem (P/Issues/<Bug Name>, in our case); and have a category for the pipelined process (Pi/TicketFlow/1) Received -> Pi/TicketFlow/2) Acknowledged, etc.). (The emails are mostly inbound)

Oh, and while in future we may find a better way to have ActiveInbox support you doing this, right now I find ‘pin’ing popular labels a huge help.

As ever, it will be great to have your own thoughts on how you use projects in email; and any similar experiences you have. Please comment below!