I did consider doing a straight forward, very artificial, story of two emails arriving; one being done immediately and given a “Waiting On” Status, and one being given a “Next” and deferred.

But I fear that approach is a little “slow” – or you might say long winded

Another approach is to pick a handful of interesting features to showcase, as part of Tour page.

Then, for each specific topic (e.g. “Using Statuses”), do a mini educational video, which would be part of the Better Gmail Guide (http://www.activeinboxhq.com/better_gmail.html).

As you can see – there’s a lot of uncertainty about the right approach… this is where I suspect I’m far too close to the subjective matter (and after 4 years, far too long away from being a “new user”!) to be objective. So please chip in with what you’d like to see, or you think others would benefit from.

Hi Andy,
I apologise for going slightly off-topic immediately…:

Before you and your colleagues invest much time in video training material — could you perhaps consider making the “Better Gmail Guide” available in a single, printer-friendly web page or .pdf file?

Although I hate wasting paper, this is a text I’d really like to *work* with, and after so many hours of screen work every day, I’d love to indulge in reading this from real paper, turning the pages forth and back, and scribbling notes on their margins…
Thank you so much for considering!
J.

Hi Jochen – thank you for reminding me about this… you make a very persuasive case

Keep them quick and simple – so I’d do one per Status. Number them so people go through these steps:

1. Introduction to the concept; labels, workflow
2. Using Next
3. Using Action
4. Using Someday
5. Using Waiting On
6. Finishing a task

It’s not hard to think of a real example where we use each of these. Follow an email through the steps..

Personally, my $.02 is that I dislike videos for the amount of time it takes to watch them. I much prefer text to video as text can be skimmed.

Certainly, that is not going to be everyone’s opinion.

If you want an example of great video training, Lynda.com is a good place to look.

Moreover, it might be a good place for an Active Inbox / email centered training course. Could drive referrals here.

Anyway, I digress. What I like about Lynda.com is that there is a text transcript to the training videos. The transcript has time coding so I can go to specific places in a video.

I have already implemented the Activebox, but there are few things/features which I am not using.

I am not using
Project/Context/Deadlines/Reference/Category/Archive.
But I am following GTD i.e using labels and processing mails and moving it to folders.

Now I am not sure, what I am missing. I would like to move from my hop-scotch way to the correct one using ActiveInbox perfectly. Kindly show it to me using videos.

Thank you James – I think that a “directive” approach as you suggest (and as opposed to picking at multiple unrelated “topics”) is a very good approach for a new user. An “ActiveInbox on rails” approach to getting people going.

Hi Neal,

I’ll take a look at Lynda, and I absolutely agree that videos can be intrusively long… if we do them we’ll try to keep them very brief.

Hi Arun,

Have you had a look at http://www.activeinboxhq.com/better_gmail.html yet? The Guide is still being worked on (and actually videos will help), but it imparts a lot of the key ideas.