Almost all of my most important emails come from people who are in my contact list. I have the good/mis-fortune of being an early adopter, and have been storing my contacts online for over 10 years. (The bad part is that there are nearly 3000, and many are stale).

As a first cut, being able to identify which emails came from people already in my contact list would be a good first-pass for me.

Also, because GMail doesn’t do this, it also creates some false positives on spam. That is, if I delete emails that come from the same person because they are dumb jokes I don’t have time for, over time Google apparently tags this person as spammer and shoves all of their email into the spam box, even though this person is a friend and is in my Gmail Contacts. So, when he finally sends me something important, e.g., his wedding invitation, I’m hosed!

Am I missing something–this seems painfully obvious to me, and critically valuable.

Jim

When I am in my office or at my laptop, I process email first thing in the morning. This empties my in box. Then whenever a new email appears, I archive if if I don’t need to deal with it immediately, or I interrupt my work and deal with it. Whenever I switch between projects during the work day, I search Gmail for unread messages (the ones I have archived without reading) and process them, so that I process incoming messages several times during the work day, and again at the end.

When I am out of the office or away from the laptop, I do essentially the same thing except that I cannot always completely handle a task that comes in as email. When that happens, I let the person who sent the message that I will respond more fully within a few days, and then I forward the message to my action email address with a note telling me what I need to do. I have a Gmail filter that automatically stars any incoming messages to the action address, so even though I have archived these messages from my mobile, they are easy to find when I get back to my office.

For my own peace of mind and in order to keep the work flow going for myself and for everyone I work with, I find that staying on top of messages rather than letting them build up helps a lot.

Of course, when I have to do things that require long-term concentration (such as writing papers), the addiction creates a problem (so I have an old laptop, with which I can’t connect to the Internet at all, which I use for that sort of stuff.

But on the whole, the whole point of using productivity tools on Gmail is that I’m addicted to it and use it all the time anyway.

…but I must say that it is a definitive before and after, ie before GTD Inbox and after.

Before GTD I had appr 1000 unsorted mails in my inbox and all these loose threads lay in my head. No control at all.

Now I have the same amount of mails neatly sorted outside my head and an empty inbox so at least it gives me a feeling of being in control. It is much more easy now to focus back to what I was doing before I checked because I have tagged the mail and archived it and know where to find it.