For professionals who have email at the heart of their daily workflow,
ActiveInbox gives you the peace of mind of knowing one of the most uncontrollable
parts of your work life is effortlessly organized and ready for action.
The fresh metaphor that ActiveInbox brings to email is that emails are not letters, emails are tasks.
Use ActiveInbox to empty your inbox, force emails into a productive flow, and get the things in your email done with maximum success.
Some of the things you can do with ActiveInbox:
You can track important conversations you need a response for
You can separate emails into projects
You can focus on high priority emails first
You can set deadlines and postpone emails to schedule your time
You can retrieve related emails for any conversation
You can find emails buried in your archive
You can impress contacts by building on past conversations
You can find info buried in your archive
You can stop important emails falling through the cracks
You can do common Gmail actions faster
You can unburden your task manager
Better control of your emails
Empty your Inbox
Clear your head of clutter and stress knowing everything is under control.
Turn emails into actions and get them done
Prioritize & schedule your attention, hold other people accountable for replying to you and ensure nothing falls out of your trusted system until it is completed.
"I used this long before I knew anything about the GTD, and it's always been absolutely essential in getting my emails organized. Now that I'm full into GTD, it's still absolutely essential! I'm so much more productive and stress free."
Jeremy White
Better vision to get email done
Drive conversations towards your goals
Rise above individual emails by grouping them into projects and desired outcomes, and always know what must be done next.
Find old emails in your Gmail folders
Use Gmail folders to find information just when you need it, e.g. when a contact calls, to solve a task, in preparation for a meeting
and to write more useful replies.
Store useful info to support conversations
Store notes about what must be done next for a given conversation.
Export your emails to other systems
Some emails contain information that would be more manageable in a dedicated system, such as events for your calendar, big items for
your issue tracker and details for your knowledge base. Keep the conversation flowing in email long enough for an item to be well understood
before exporting it to your other tools.
"An essential tool for my email handling. It really helps to make sure important emails get dealt with and not buried."
CRM17
Better relationships with co-workers and clients
Impress contacts with timely, useful replies
Using ActiveInbox's features to bring prioritization, scheduling and control to your email ensures that no contact is ever disappointed by
a forgotten or inadequate response.
Best of all, your reputation will grow as a by product of your well managed communication.
Build on the momentum of your earlier conversations
Delight contacts and keep conversations on target by incorporating existing discussion into future emails.
"when I discovered [ActiveInbox] it definitely was close to a religious experience!"
Niiloa
Better Gmail to do common actions faster
Glide through your inbox and emails
Use powerful shortcuts to action, categorize and move through emails rapidly.
"So, [ActiveInbox] helps to keep your Inbox clean, without clogging your head with details. Your mind is absolutely free for creativity."
TurboMilk
A New Way of Looking at Email
At the heart of ActiveInbox is a new metaphor for email: it is no longer a simple exchange of letters, it is a flow of actions. Emails are just badly formated tasks.
Each email is a single step, a single action, to communicate towards
a desired outcome (find a venue, organize a meeting, book a holiday, solve a bug, etc.) and to increase your
personal reputation and relationships (how soon did you reply, how useful was your reply, how proactive were you
at getting something sorted, how personal was your response, etc.).
Email has become a habitat, a place where we receive tasks, delegate tasks, share information, track projects and build relationships.
Yet email tools have not evolved to reflect this, they are stuck with the old 'letter in-tray' metaphor.
Moving far beyond traditional email clients, ActiveInbox gives you a brand new mindset and a more efficient toolset to bring your email under control.
How can you put ActiveInbox to work?
ActiveInbox improves email with a great workflow and innovative features for people wanting increased personal effectiveness; using email for sales, customer service and media relations; team communication & management;
and especially for people who "live in email".
People use ActiveInbox to manage a high volume of email, to manage the flow of important emails, to keep their other personal management tools email free and even
to turn Gmail into a complete task manager!
With a well organized email system and ActiveInbox's tools, no matter what work you are focusing on, which email you are replying to,
whoever calls,
or whatever your boss demands for a report by 10am, you can pull together information buried deep in your email archive quickly & easily.
-
See all emails organized by project (and contact, schedule, context...)
Do Everything Faster
-
Preview and action emails in the inbox
-
Find specific information by drilling into search results
-
Set visibility of Recent Labels
-
Send quick personal memos
-
Intuitive keyboard navigation
-
Context menu for every label, email and contact with timely commands
Many emails contain information that relates to plans/data that is better stored outside your email client. Events for your calendar, tasks on your task list or in
your project manager and details inside your wiki or knowledge base.
Many emails are discussions or resources relating to your general tasks and projects.
Use ActiveInbox to link emails to your other task systems.
We will be working at this throughout 2010. Let us know what services you use at the Community Forum.
Who uses ActiveInbox and why?
Business managers and team leaders use email to assign tasks to team members.
Team members respond with status updates and work among themselves.
ActiveInbox streamlines this by making delegation and project tracking dependable in email, and by automating email prioritization for groups such as co-workers, teams and bosses.
Sales is all about relationships, and the principle strength of ActiveInbox is nurturing professional relationships through excellent control of email.
Whether you are a sales agent using dedicated CRM tools and working in a team, or the only person in your company doing sales
out of your inbox, email is still the most prevalent form of communication in business (it is, after all, the lowest common
denominator).
By providing instant access to historic discussion, grouping emails into projects, guiding conversations with simple pipelines and
setting follow up deadlines; ActiveInbox helps you signal to your leads that they are highly valued, while helping you effortlessly track progress.
ActiveInbox works well with your existing web-based CRM system (which we recommend you use, as ActiveInbox is only part of the solution).
It does this by using simple mechanisms to link emails and contacts to data in your CRM, and using
shortcuts to export emails/files to it.
Customer support is the art of reassuring customers, fixing genuine problems, and seeing the big picture of feedback from customers.
Email is the chosen medium for a lot of customer support questions and complaints, because it's quick and not confrontational. As it's
also high volume and demanding of timely, friendly replies; ActiveInbox is very useful for managing those support emails.
You may wish to export the issues reported to customer support in a more manageable/collaborative system. With a simple and flexible
export process, ActiveInbox can help you do this.
For example, when we receive bug reports by email, we create a label for it or
add it to an existing label (e.g. P/Issues/GlitchX), and export the details to our bug tracker (along with the label to search on
to see all related emails). When the bug is fixed, we pull up all emails (on P/Issues/GlitchX) and if they aren't finished, send
a reply to inform the customer the bug has been fixed and then complete the conversation. (We might also link that label to a blog
post about fixing the bug, for complete records). In essence, we manage all communication about the bug in email, and manage the
team's fixing of the bug in our backend system, with close connections between the two.
Of all our users, we believe self-starting independents driving to succeed and grow have the most to gain from ActiveInbox.
This is because you most likely "live in email", thriving or dying by your ability to sell to clients, support them, build
professional relationships, work with remote partners and react to incoming tasks.
Your need - and time available - for separate
project management & CRM tools is minimal compared to your need for a lightweight tool for handling as much as possible within email.
ActiveInbox brings your inbox under control, tying the flow of tasks, projects and people within your email and calendar to your goals.
(And if you want to still use a personal task manager for general activities, and ActiveInbox for just email tasks, they will
work great together).
Journalists & bloggers share characteristics with sales and customer support people, in that much of their work is building
relationships. Be they tippers, remote co-workers or CEOs and other persons of interest, a journalist needs their email to assist
them with driving the relationships forward to bring new opportunities.
Meanwhile, because of their public exposure, a journalist must deal with a high load of inbound email, where each one might
be a tip or capable of leading to a future opportunity. Nothing can be ignored.
ActiveInbox helps in both cases. All worthwhile incoming email is turned into a task to guarantee it will be processed,
grouped into projects, possibly associated with an article, and be presented as a coherent whole when reviewing all the information you've
exchanged with a contact. You can even instantly see a contact's social media profiles and websites to better understand
their background and what you can discuss in future.
A special mention goes to fans of David Allen's GTD, as ActiveInbox (formerly GTDInbox) was originally made as a means to manage
your 'email bucket' with GTD® best practices. With inbuilt support for Statuses, Projects, Contexts and References; ActiveInbox
transforms Gmail into a GTD® task manager for your flow of email.
Did you know? ActiveInbox features are entirely customizable...
ActiveInbox users fall into two broad camps: professionals with a high demand for a solution that
keeps their emails, communication and contacts well managed; and light users who simply desire
a better Gmail.
Therefore all ActiveInbox features can be customized, and even disabled. Just
need shortcuts for faster processing in Gmail? You got it. Prefer to just get closer to
your contacts? You can do it. Need complete task-based control of your communication? Power it up!
