This wasn’t intended, but given the insight yielded by the discussion on Statuses, I’m now really interested to know how you structure Projects. I think we can refine our Review process.

This is particularly aimed at anyone who has nested/folder-esque projects and sub projects  - e.g. P/GTDInbox/Ideas. How do you do you structure your project and sub-project labels? What is your process for deciding how to categorise? How do you review those projects?

I know in my case, I use P/GTDInbox/Ideas and P/GTDInbox/Bugs, but P/GTDInbox itself is quite redundant. It’s just a convenient way to organise (and hide) my labels.

It raises a really interesting question, which is, should we be doing more with P/GTDInbox? If, on the GTDInbox sidebar, I click P/GTDInbox, I actually expect search results that include that label and all its children (I.e. “label:p-gtdinbox OR label:p-gtdinbox-ideas OR label:p-gtdinbox-bugs“). I certainly think it makes more sense, but it is quite different to the Gmail approach, and therefore I wonder if there is a use case that it would be bad for – the only one I can think is where you are using the parent label for some purpose, and only want to view it on its own.

(I’d also really appreciate any examples where your parent labels – as with my P/GTDInbox – are regularly used even though they have more specific child labels?)

As you no doubt know, the forum disappeared when the website and everything else had the major overhaul for 3.0, and was replaced by UserVoice.

Our problem with the old forum was that, for features and bug reports at least, it was too messy and unstructured for us to easily process. Ideas/bug-reports were getting lost in the noise.

But, it’s clear that in losing the forum we lost a little bit of community too. Clearly, the forum was enabling discussion beyond simple feature/bug submission, and it was short-sighted to let that go.

So, the forum is back at http://www.gtdinbox.com/forum/

Hopefully UserVoice will still be the first choice for reporting and voting on specific items, and the forum will be for sharing tips and more general discussion.

PSA over

Alpha 20! I’m not sure that’s a milestone to be proud of

This was a big bug fixing effort. Some problems with internationalisation, several problems for new users (+ some new niceties for them too), problems if you actually achieved inbox zero (that was a particular ironic delight!), the Force Above Chat checkbox that didn’t work on Windows and a few smaller issues for good measure.

I condensed the ‘Quick Views’ and ‘Label Categories’ into a single pane, ‘Reviews’. I was never happy with the use of Statuses in the Label Categories as it did not make sense alongside a bulb. Hopefully you’ll find the new layout much more elegant, as well as flexible.

Finally, we’re not done yet – I think there will be another release this week. I wanted to get this out as fast as possible though, because the bugs were frankly tiresome for everyone

http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

I’m thinking about the Popup. The one used by Overview, Label Browser and Contact Browser to see active items.

Currently, it looks like this:

Popup Active Views (Before)

It’s built this way because the assumption with Statuses is there are only 3 types. 1) Things to be done, 2) Things you are waiting on from others, 3) Things that could be done, but have no priority.

It is also assumed that any custom Status labels that you create can only be of type #1: Things to be done. So the logic is that all statuses (except Waiting On / Some Day) go into ‘To Do’.

The main problem with this, other than it may be slightly confusing for first time users, is that I’m increasingly aware that some people create a fairly unique approach to their Statuses; and our assumptive rules are too inflexible.

So, the alternative possibility is this:

Popup Active Views (After)

Here, each Status has its own tab. The major possible downside is that if people create too many custom Status labels it will become messy and unworkable.

I’d love your input on this, and I think the best question to ask is,

If you have customised your Statuses then how do you use them?

I.e., if you have more Status labels than Action/WaitingOn/SomeDay then please tell us about your workflow.

My own feeling – not to influence your response – is that changing to represent each Status is a good idea. It’s clean, easy to understand, and flexible (and the ‘messy tabs’ concern can be avoided by taking care when creating Status labels).

In case it changes your thoughts, please note that in the future, we will be adding a few bits of functionality related to this:

• The ability to refine (aka ‘drill into’) a view. So, you could be on the ‘To Do’ tab, and then filter that tab to just show ‘Urgent’ items. This is a clean approach, but there is still no permanent visual indication to the number of items in each Status – which you would get with more tabs.
• We could add the ability to sort by Statuses (as you can sort by Projects/Context/Contact now).
  So, you could be in the ‘To Do’ tab, and group the items by their Status. The limitation here is that you cannot group by both Project and Status at the same time (which is what Refine/Filter is intended to solve).
• We are trying to find alternatives so you do not have to use S/Next Action labels (unless you particularly want to) – e.g. Deadlines, Project/Context/Contact Notes.

One major difference between GTDInbox and most of the other task+email systems out there (inc. Google Tasks) is that GTDInbox turns an email into a task. Those other systems encourage you to create a task, and add an email to it.

We’ve thought about this on and off over the years, and even flirted with the idea of creating standalone tasks within our system.

But, it has just never made sense to us.

Tasks buried in email are unique creatures. They are fast flowing, they are small, they are often half defined and part of a bigger picture. Most are quick to solve, and a significant number require collaboration with others to solve (delegate, ask for help, etc.). They are simply not traditional tasks; and therefore do not cleanly fit into traditional task management systems.

I think the point is, it is economically senseless to try and create a task for every email (or every couple of emails). It requires considerable effort – and therefore time – to think up a task name, to connect it with the email, and to manage it. The reality is that most email tasks are processed too quickly to make that effort worthwhile. We just want to say “this email is an action, don’t let me forget it, help me understand where it fits in, and help me respond better”.

The one arguable benefit of creating separate tasks is to help understand where individual emails fit into the bigger picture. But GTD gives us a clean and simple mechanism for that: Projects. Your projects are descriptions of tasks (P/CreateForecastForPete). And in Gmail, labels fit far more quickly – and flexibly – into your workflow than cumbersome separate tasks.

Put simply, our mantra of “emails are actions” is not about to change. Nor is our desire to stay lightweight and in harmony with Gmail. It’s not for everyone, but it’s simple, it’s fast, it requires minimal effort and it’s the optimal – native – solution for effective, organized communication.

(I should make it clear I’m not against traditional task managers. But I am saying email is a different beast and requires something better suited to its true nature. Certainly, for some kinds of task buried in email it makes sense to ‘export’ them to a bigger system. Just not the majority.).

Is anyone still having problems getting GTDInbox to load?

If so, please reply in the comments here, or drop me an email (andy@gtdinbox.com) today, and I will try and work with you to get it fixed.

It would be  a great help if you include details from the troubleshooting bit in the FAQ (see ‘GTDInbox has stopped working, what do I do?’).

While thinking about email in general, and its weaknesses, I stumbled upon a way of looking at email that in our 3 years I’ve never been able to articulate – it’s entirely reactive, and thus horrible at trying to organise it around your own schedule.

Why is it reactive? Because you are always responding to events that happen to you – namely, an email arriving. In other areas of work this kind of behaviour would be called “fighting fires” – there’s always a new outburst of flame demanding attention.

No client or methodology is particularly well suited to saying “I’m going to ignore this email for a while, and then efficiently process it as a batch with similar emails (at a time that suits me)”.

I.e. No client is supporting proactive email processing.

I think we come quite close – we encourage emails to be actioned, deferred, and grouped together; but it’s missing one big thing… Goals.

Goals are what would truly enable us to be confident and proactive. To say, “these are my outcomes for today / this week”, then pull up the actioned emails associated with those goals, and process them.

These thoughts are helping refine our GTDInbox methodology for taking email productivity up a level. More as it comes!

Just wanted to acknowledge the fact there hasn’t been an update for a while… we’ve hit a bit of a plateau with features/methodology so we’re taking a step back to re-evaluate what we’re doing.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing too dramatic. Just simple questions like how well do the features we have solve problems, what problems exist that we are overlooking, what are the different ways of processing the inbox – that kind of stuff.

We’re also very keen to kick start the Pro version as some fresh revenue would allow us to go a lot faster, so how we can do that is also part of the whirling collection of ideas and plans.

I’m hoping that we’ll be back in progress this week, Pete & I are set to sit down tonight and collate all our thoughts into an action plan. I will keep you posted!

PS I just realised my last Wordpress (blog) update ruined the blog’s design – sigh, will get it back

PPS I’m seeing all your emails/comments/UserVoice-requests, and it’s all being noted! Just a little behind in getting back to you :/

This release fixes several small flaws – the ‘Compose Personal’ bug (caused by a minor change in Gmail), the ability to put the GTDInbox sidebar box above the standard Chat box, and ensuring the Labels menu on the Popup scrolls correctly.

http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

I will also send this release to Mozilla Addons as I think we’ve hit a suitably stable milestone.

Development has been a little intermittent this last week because I’ve been out and about attending some industry events, looking for people with great skills who can help us accelerate, and more generally planning our next few months of building.

Normal programming will resume next week (from Tuesday the 8th), and I will start to write up and share a few of the plans – things are starting to get exciting again after our recent months of steady refinement, and I look forward to getting your input.