One thing I’ve been considering is the ability to pipeline labels. Suppose you’re dealing with the press. When you first contact them, you might give it the label ‘P/PR/3.0Launch/Contacted’. As the conversation progresses, you might want to move it through stages, such as P/PR/3.0Launch/Interested and then P/PR/3.0Launch/Published.

I’m not yet sure whether we need a special UI in GTDInbox to facilitate this. It could follow the Status label model, and only allow one label to be active at once. And suggest the next/previous stage of the pipeline for quick transitions.

I agree there is a responsibility (maybe even it’s just the point) with Waiting On to check up and monitor progress.

With upcoming features, I want to be able to drill into Waiting On with some preset searches. So you can say “give me S/Waiting On items that are over a week old”. Or, “Give me S/Waiting On items for important contacts/groups”.

Also, you’ll be able to deadline specific Waiting On emails (Today, Tomorrow, in X days, etc.); which will interrupt you to remind you to check them (rather than you remembering to run your safety net).

I’m intrigued by this.

We will be adding Clean-Up/Saved searches to Plus sometime soon, with ‘relative’ search operators, like ‘7.daysago’. So, you could have a standby status, such as S/Sandboxed (or as Gamelux suggests, just use S/Some Day) and have a Clean-Up search of “S/Sandboxed before:7.daysago”. This would show you all items you’d deferred for processing that are over a week old.

I have to disagree with the first poster, zalkind, in that every email that comes into the Inbox is an Action — you have to open it and read it, then decide how to categorize it, archive it or delete it, THAT is an action. More on this in a minute . . .

When I first started using GTDInbox a little over two years ago, there was no ‘Next Action’ label. Instead, Next Actions were indicated by use of the Star. I found this to be very convenient and intuitive — the star is easy to add and remove (even from the Inbox), it is very visible, and, in keeping with the point of the star in the first place, it readily indicates the important nature of the email or it’s contents.

To me, both ‘Action’ and ‘Next Action’ have an important and distinct purpose. ‘Actions’ are anything I can do right now *or* any time in the future — they need to be done, I am not ‘waiting on’ anything for their completion, but they are not imperative. ‘Next Actions,’ on the other hand, I need to complete ASAP.

So every email, from the time it arrives until the time it is deleted/archived, is an action, by nature of the fact that *something* needs to be done to it and that something requires me to act upon it. I agree that forcing the Action label onto every new email would be a problem, because that would remove any previously applied Status (Next, Waiting on, etc). However, Gmail ALREADY provides a built-in Action status — when an email arrives, it is placed at the top of the Inbox, and it is highlighted. It’s placement and it’s new-message highlighting tell me that an Action is required (I need to at least open it and read it).

Personally, I would like to do away with both the ‘Action’ and ‘Next Action’ statuses. Instead, GTDInbox would FORCE new-message highlighting for every email that is not Trash, Spam or Finished. Next Actions can be Starred. Clicking Finished will remove the Star (as GTDInbox used to behave) and/or new-message highlighting and auto-archive the finished message. In other words, even if you open an email, read it, and return to the Inbox, the message will appear UNREAD, which is an easy to see indication that an Action is still required, without having to scan the labels, which can get crowded, for what type of action it is.

The filter I can’t do but would like to is something like this:

Show me all emails labeled with S/Action, for which its project (its label J/…) has no emails labeled S/NextAction (for me NextAction is strictly GTD, it is the action that pushes forward a project, all others are sub-goals of the project). So what I want is a quick way to review all actions of projects that has no next action, i.e., which project should be moved forward?

Would something like this would ever be possible in GTDInbox?