GTDInbox - GTD, Task Management and a Better Inbox for Gmail

Fixing Email (with GTDInbox)

Andy Mitchell, February 2008

A Quick Introduction

Effective communication needs to be ubiquitous, and email is the one thing every computer user is comfortable with. As communication is the core component of decent productivity, it follows that email must be a key part of your work-flow.

And yet it isn't that simple. Yes, email is something everyone does, but it certainly doesn't feel productive. Experience tells us that, and email bashing has recently come into vogue (see ‘Further Reading' below).

A handful of products have also sprung up recently looking at ways to cure it, GTDInbox 2 (GTDInbox 1 was ahead of the curve, but wasn't explicitly solving inbox problems, just task management), Xobni, Xoopit and more.
All these solutions are trying to radically evolve email, pioneering techniques that will one day hopefully become standard in all email clients.

Finding a Solution

"Overload" is the word most associated with email, and it stems from its main strength: simplicity. Your email inbox is just a big, long list of items acrued over many years. The crux of the problem is in making sense of those items.
Once something disappears into your inbox it's incredibly hard to track it down again. This pain is felt daily, trying to retrieve “that chat with Paul about Project X 2 months ago”, “that entertaining link about the monkey's from sometime in 2007” or “a receipt for that TV I bought”.

The other oft-cited problem is finding the time to respond to the incoming messages. There's no real quality control on who can contact you, and it's so easy to send an email that people no longer think twice about the effect it will have on you. They (and we, when the situation is reversed) see it as ‘just one more email', whereas we see it as ‘the 100th demand today'.

So, your email inbox is both a huge mass of important data that you cannot find, and a constant source of new demands.

A solution, therefore, must address these broad areas:

• It must categorise and cluster related items, so they can be much more effectively retrieved.
• It must prioritise the incoming email, to help you decide what to do and what to defer.
• And finally, it must begin to understand your relationship to the people who email you, to help with the above prioritisation and categorisation.

Let's look at those in a little more detail...

Categorise and Cluster

The traditional approach here was to put items into folders, a solution that – while better than nothing at all – led to huge nested folders that were a nightmare to maintain, a nightmare to navigate, and forced you to make difficult decisions for each filed email (does it belong in “Urgent Response” or “GTDInbox Bugs”?).

Gmail made very significant advances in this area. Labelling, rather than folders, removed decision paralysis, by allowing you to have a single item in multiple buckets. Threaded views was a master stroke, recognising that huge chunks of your inbox were actually an ongoing conversation. This is the reason I only have 6,000 threads, rather than 24,000 emails to try and navigate. It is also blessed with a very fast and effective search system. Gmail is the ultimate basic email system.

GTDInbox takes this basic framework and - using some general GTD principles - creates highly meaningful relationships between threads, as well as with contacts. GTDInbox gives you Projects, Contexts (the place items can be completed) and References (resources, such as invoices, meeting notes, etc.), and then associates them with Contacts.
The overall effect is that you can click a Project, Context, Reference or Contact and find related items. You can look at an item, find the related Project, and find other References within that project (e.g. you open an email from an alpine-chalet company, browse to the SkiHoliday project, and find related invoices). You can look at a Contact, and see which other contacts they're often associated with, or perhaps find all contacts associated with a project (e.g. email all the people associated with the SkiHoliday project).

With GTDInbox, all you need to do is find a start point - such as a newly received email - and then browse cluster by cluster to discover the relevant information you need to get things done.

Prioritise

In regular email, all threads are created equally. The most common way for people to judge whether something is complete is whether or not it is marked as read, leaving a general sensation of a ‘ton of work' hanging over you.

There are broadly three kinds of email:

• Action. The most common kind. You're expected to do something – at the very least to reply, and probably to do some work.
• Information. Providing you with a useful piece of info, that's probably related to some work you're doing.
• The Acknowledgement. The polite email, often sent in response to an earlier email you sent, but doesn't actually add anything.

GTDInbox's heritage as a task management system makes it very effective at prioritisation. The most useful prioritisation you can do is apply a status to an email. You can denote it as an action (to be done imminently), waiting on (needs attention, but ignore while waiting for someone else) or to do someday (needs attention, but don't let it clog up your immediate to do list). This enables you to very quickly draw up a list of things you must accomplish, things you need to check the status of with other people, and things you can review when your to do list shrinks. And items without a status? They're finished, and so no longer need to weigh down your inbox or your brain. (GTDInbox also encourages you to finish an email within 2 minutes - if it can be done - letting you focus on the few remaining important actions).

There is a basic ideal that your inbox should always be empty. New inbox items simply need categorising and archiving, reducing your inbox to zero. To process actions, you simply review anything with a Status. A very positive side effect of doing this is that nothing ever slips through your net, i.e. you never let that unread email slip so deep into your inbox that it is never seen again.

Social Contacts

Email is the original – and still very sophisticated – social network. It is home to possibly your most extensive list of contacts, and it also understands the importance of various relationships, based on the frequency of contact (as well as other factors, like how many emails you keep, what you say, etc.).

Understanding more about your contacts does not solve prioritisation and retrieval problems, but it is the most important ‘supporting role'.

So how can contacts improve your email?

• Exploit relationships. For example, you know something you wanted to find was in a discussion with ‘Bob', so you look at Projects related to Bob, and then search within all conversations with Bob about Project X.
• When an email arrives, auto-label (filter) based on the contact, or the group that contact is in (e.g. a member of a project, or in the office context)
• Understand more about the contact by connecting 3rd party services – e.g. their photos from a recent holiday found in Flickr; enabling your reply to be more personal.

GTDInbox enables far better use of the relationships inherent between contacts, and there are plans afoot to do more to connect up 3rd party services in the future.

Summary

Unfortunately GTDInbox is currently restricted to Firefox and Gmail. But the concepts it is pioneering are proving themselves highly useful in the field, and it is hopefully only a matter of time until more traditional email software starts absorbing them.

For me, GTDInbox significantly advances the power of my inbox. I look at a regular email system as a tall and narrow cardboard box, where you've thrown in all your old letters, invoices, notes and ideas. GTDInbox acts like a librarian, taking the new letters you pass it and neatly categorising them into different boxes, and always handing you back the information you need. It is making sense of your inbox, saving you time, making you more effective and preserving your sanity in the process!

Further Reading

• http://gigaom.com/2007/09/20/is-email-the-ultimate-social-environment/
• http://blackrimglasses.com/archives/2008/01/22/e-mail-and-the-problem/
• http://www.winextra.com/2008/01/23/why-is-email-stuck-in-the-80s/
• http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/09/where-is-your-s.htm