Getting Started

Works The Way You Do

The most important thing to know about ActiveInbox is that it is simple, and 100% harmonious with Gmail (and works everywhere you use Gmail).

All statuses, deadlines, projects and any other categorization are just Gmail labels at heart.

The root of ActiveInbox is the belief that emails are not letters, they're tasks, flowing between every knowledge worker in the world. Tasks and projects often start in the inbox as a rough discussion, get refined through conversation, before being crystalized into an actionable which can be completed or moved into your main management tool. Your inbox becomes your first line of defence against incoming tasks, and your email client a habitat: the central place where work is received, managed and delegated in organizations.

The problem is that the email client is ill suited to managing tasks: it's an in tray that just piles things up until the older items sink into oblivion and get forgotten.

Transform an email into a task until it's complete

Stop leaving things in your inbox, and start using ActiveInbox to never forget an important email again!

Give an email a Status / Priority (e.g. Next for top priority, Action for things to be done later, or Waiting On for things you expect others to do) and then use ActiveInbox's Review Bar to track it until it's complete.

Technically, a status is just a Gmail label that begins with !. You can add, edit and remove statuses just by modifying labels; and you can even change the prefix (!) to be anything you want it to be, using the Preferences.

Bring an email back later with a deadline

Impress contacts by replying on the day that you promise to, or 'snooze' an email so that you can safely ignore it until a future date!

Keep a note of your progress on a conversation

Store next actions, private thoughts, or links to where you exported the email contents to.

The notes are stored safely on our server, available anywhere you use ActiveInbox.

Surface your work with Projects

Often, the same "thing" (be it a complaint, a mini project, a new feature) gets discussed over multiple conversations, and often with several different people.

It's a real challenge to move that "thing" forward towards your goal until you stop thinking about the individual emails, and start thinking in terms of the unit of work.

With ActiveInbox, it's super easy to group emails into manageable Project folders to make them easy to find later, make sense of the muddle, and get them finished.

Technically, Project labels are just those that begin with P/, which enables ActiveInbox to detect them. You can use / (forward slash) to create sub folders, e.g. P/Issues/IssueX will have the IssueX folder inside the Issues folder.

Bringing ActiveInbox Into Your Workflow:

Your First Run

  1. The only thing you need to do is click 'Setup ActiveInbox' when you first open a conversation. This will create your main status labels (e.g. !Next for top priority, !Waiting On for things you expect others to do), or if you already use some kind of 'to do label' of your own creation, teach ActiveInbox how to use it.
  2. After that, you may wish to set a status, set a deadline, or create a project label; and most importantly: start clearing out your inbox!
  3. Finally, track active items and delve into projects from the Review Bar.

Clearing out your inbox

Achieve inbox zero and be relaxed knowing that there are no nasty surprises left waiting.

For every email in your inbox, if it can be done in under 2 minutes, do it instantly and archive it; if it's not at all important, archive it; and if you must do it later give it a status or deadline and archive it (you can then track it with the Review Bar, ideally at least once "let's do email" time a day).

FAQ

I already use Gmail's Stars to track important conversations

You may wish to keep doing this, while slowly starting to adopt the use of status labels for new conversations, to get more nuanced control of your "to do" items.

I already have labels I use for Projects

You could keep these, and start using ActiveInbox project labels (which have the prefix P/, so ActiveInbox can recognise them). Once ActiveInbox recognises your project labels, it can give you smarter ways to monitor projects and group/sort your "to do" items by project.

Or you can migrate your existing project labels to be ActiveInbox Projects, using a tool found in the Preferences that renames your chosen labels to use the P/ prefix. E.g. MyProject might become P/MyProject (note: you can also use different prefixes for better readability: some people use Project/, others use a symbol, like #/).

Can I use it on my mobile/iPhone/iPad/Android/etc.

We don't have a mobile client yet (and may never do, as it's incredibly challenging to improve upon Apple or Google's current mail offerings). But because ActiveInbox uses Gmail labels for all its categorization (e.g. S/Action turns an email into a task, P/Project groups it into a project, D/D/1 sets the deadline, etc.), those labels are available wherever you use Gmail.

So you can use the normal Gmail mobile client to do searches for all active items (S/Action).

Quick Tips

Pin your most important statuses and deadline times so they're always visible

It's much harder to keep your eye on what's to be done when it's buried in a menu, so pin the item (e.g. Today, or Waiting On) to the Review Bar (across the top of Gmail).

Get a more powerful view of your to do's

Whenever you select something from the Review Bar, or do a Gmail Search, you get the choice of viewing 'Active Results' (instead of regular Gmail Results). This view gives you easy grouping & sorting by project, contact, status and deadline so you can stay focused on what matters most to you.

Couple Active Results with a filtered view for the most power: for example, select a Project and then group the results by status.

Nb. as the name implies, Active Results are only those emails with a status or a deadline. I.e. things you've still got to complete!

Use 'Send & Archive' after every reply to ensure your inbox stays empty

I hope we don't have to explain this one :)

Flow through your emails faster with new shortcuts

With ActiveInbox, you can glide through your inbox or any other batch of emails by not only arching/sending each one, but doing it and moving to the next conversation in just one click (using the arrowed 'Move Nexter' buttons).

Reduce inbox-clogging "thanks!" emails

Our "Send EOM" (End Of Message) button not only sends and automatically archives the email, it also adds "NO REPLY EXPECTED" so the recipient knows you're not expecting a polite response.

Write smarter replies with 'Previous Emails'

ActiveInbox helps you send accurate, complete and professional emails. Use the previous email viewer while you're writing so you can get a quick reminder of what you were discussing. Or even copy-and-paste text from earlier messages straight into your email.

Escalate tasks & events to your specialised tools

Like it or not, because email is so ubiquitous your inbox is where new tasks, projects & events arrive, often in the form of a swirling and ill-defined discussion.

The beauty of ActiveInbox's simplicity is that you will be able to refine, crystalise and ultimately complete most of them without ever leaving Gmail.

But some things belong in your more purpose-orientated tools that are specially designed to manage that kind of thing.

For example, you might escalate an event to GCal, a task/project (having been tracked to a point of solid understanding by ActiveInbox) into your company's project manager, or a problem report into your issue tracking spreadsheet.

If you do this, we suggest using a combination of ActiveInbox Notes and Gmail's URLs that point to specific emails or search results (the text in the browser's address bar).

How do we mean? Well, suppose you were tracking a new idea as a project (P/Ideas/IdeaX), you might create a project in your project manager, with some text to link it back to the search results in Gmail of all your discussions. This might be in the format http://mail.google.com/mail/?#search/label:p-ideas-ideax.

Or if you've moved an email into GCal, you might copy a link to the GCal event into your Notes on that conversation, so it's always just one click away when you look at the email.

Consider 3Sentences

This isn't ours but we just like it and think you might too. Keeping emails tight & to the point delights everyone, find out more at http://three.sentenc.es/.