Thanks to Paul Thompson (aka Captbunzo), I’ve started to question the effectiveness of our Labels in the sidebar – the ones that popout to show you the label hierarchy when you move your mouse over them (Projects, Contexts, etc.).
The proposal is two-fold,
1) The new Gmail ‘recent labels’ UI is a pain in the backside for GTD-based labels, as it pushes everything down. Therefore we should include an option to make these be hideable.
2) The labels popout is too fiddly to be useful. Instead, we should restore how labels used to be handled, where they are permanently fixed to the sidebar (but can be hidden by category).
The benefits, on top of being less jumpy (and therefore easier to click), is that they give you a constant ‘at a glance’ overview of the state of your inbox/actions; serving as a gentle nudge.
I think this will be an improvement, but I can see a downside that it potentially consumes more space (although I’ll say again, you will be able to hide each category). I think we will go ahead and try this, but we can always refine it (or restore the current method) – but let me know your thoughts before I change anything?
Thanks to Paul Thompson (aka Captbunzo), we’ve started to have a closer look at the effectiveness of our Labels in the Sidebar – the Projects/Contexts/etc. that popout to show the label hierarchy.
The reasons for the change, and thus the proposed changes, are two-fold:
1) The new Gmail ‘recent labels’ UI is a pain in the backside for GTD-based labels, as it pushes everything down and needs constant scrolling. Therefore we should include an option to make these hideable.
2) The labels box that pops out is too fiddly to be useful. Instead, we should restore how labels used to be handled: where they are permanently fixed inside the sidebar (but can be hidden by category).
The benefits, beyond being less jumpy (and therefore easier to click), is that they give you a constant ‘at a glance’ overview of the state of your inbox/actions; serving as a gentle nudge.
I think this will be an improvement, but I can see a downside that it potentially consumes more space (although I’ll say again, you will be able to hide each category). Let me know your thoughts before I change anything?
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Any possibility of being able to have a choice for the way the popout labels are handled? Being a minimalist, I myself prefer to have them pop out as they are – however I can see the benefit for the proposed new (old) system.
I agree that the current GTDI labels in the sidebar are too jumpy to use easily.
What would help me would be if, when I clicked on the “number of labels” more link, each label had an indicator of how many action and waiting status messages were carrying it. Then I could glance through them to see which ones might need attending to as part of my weekly review. It would also help if you could get the drop down list to stay open when I click on a label, so I don’t have to repeat the step of opening the drop down every time I move to a new label. I have nearly 300 labels, so being able to spot the ones that have actionable items is important.
I like the new status buttons. They’re a little smaller? and are a little easier on the eyes. The last set jumped out quite a bit, while these just are there when you need them without calling too much attention to themselves.
Also I’m with everybody about the unuseability of the current sidebar lables. It would be great to have that section be a little more intuitive. And I have a little trouble with the drop down labels in an email. Fairly often when I want to click the more button on a label that has sub folders the label window closes. It’s nice that it remembers where I was but I still have to reopen the menu. I really like the option to have my labels inline is there any effort being put in to get them back?
Sometimes progress means taking a step back, and i applaud the team for having the wisdom to recognize this as a possibility in this case – as well, of course, for your steady dedication and improvements. I would love to see a return to the old format.
Best,
M.
I should have added another comment about the structure of the labels in Gmail and how this affects GTDI. The Gmail labels are flat rather than nested. We emulate nesting by adding slashes to the label names, but this does not really create nesting. Gmail doesn’t have a way to organize labels hierarchically, and this is a problem that Google knows about. If Google could add a hierarchical labeling system with drag and drop so that labels could be moved about without retyping their names, it would be a big improvement. Meanwhile, in GTDI, the interface creates the appearance of hierarchically nested labels, but I wonder if GTDI would not be more useful if it did away with this so that the labels would appear in a long list with an indicator showing which ones had actionable items. This would not look as nice, but it might be quicker to use.
For people working with the 43folders system (which is a great complement to GTD), labelling should be user-friendly. Presently I use s/01 s/02…s/43 for labels and it is great as it is displayed in the header of the email. However, using at least 43 labels plus context labels plus project labels makes a lot a labels and a very long side bar as the 43 labels are put on the s/ subdivision to have them in the header. Should a 43 labels category create to have them in the header of the email with the s/ category but be reduced on the side bar as a scrolling display?
Agree that current popout is too fiddly. V2 was very good – why change? Also take a look at how Folders4Gmail solves it quite similar to V2, but adds the new functionality of Gmail labels to the layout……
What turns me off about the new labels popup out is that the submenu has to be scrolled. This means a lot of precise mouse movement: mouse over category, mouse horizontally to menu (an angled movement crosses another category and you start over), mouse to scroll area, scroll, mouse to label, etc.
I would suggest adding a click to the category to open the submenu and have it open as large as it needs to be. Perhaps multiple columns if theres a lot of categories so the height doesn’t get too drastic. This adds an extra click, but eliminates a lot of mouse movement. A click anywhere off of the submenu would hide the submenu. (This is the behavior of the “xx More” button under the new customized labels list of default gmail).
I suggest keeping both methods as an option, but prefer the old way over the (unpolished) new way. But please don’t make it difficult to find the Quick Links. I think all the buttons you make to sort by labels are great, but they are all single label searches. Any custom search I make is better than any of those. Old school GTDi used to have more multi-label search buttons. If I’m going to be digging around in submenus, I might as well have some of those.
I much preferred the old way; the biggest problem now, is that when I click the label, it searches for that label -combined with a status label! So if I just want to show everything archived under a project, it’s not easy to do, (short of scrolling through my now massive alphabetical list of labels on GMail;)
I would prefer it if clicking on a label (ex. a project) showed me all emails related to that project;
An added feature could be a quick way to show groups of labels – ex. a specific project label with a specific status label, for example; But for me, I more often am reviewing something that I had archived – and just want to quickly see the whole collection;
Hi
have about 120 labels and the chat box has gone way down. Is there a way I can bring it and send a few labels down?
Anil Atluri
I like it the way it is… Not sure I understand your new suggestion completely but I think the current version is the best in a long time and I am quite pleased… But as long as you keep things optional feel free to go nuts and maybe I will see the advantage later…
I actually like the new (current) version of label handling since it gives me the option of seeing all the emails associated with a label or only those that have a status by clicking either the label name or the little icon.
The only problem is the potential size of the popout box and consequent scrolling. I think a simple way to fix this would be if we could move the GTDInbox box over to the right hand side of the mails – I currently have Chat set up on the right side (via Labs). My inbox is usually down to about 10 or 11 emails so scrolling is a no-no. With GTDInbox on the right there should be enough real estate to have things pop up without scrolling.
Of course, if you could suppress GMail’s own labels box or move that to the right that would be ideal – nice to dream!
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