GTD with Gmail (Part II)
Part II of this feature details the first half of processing items in GTD with Gmail. If you haven’t read how the collection process works, skip down to yesterday’s post - it is crucial.
Once emails (things) have been collected in my Gmail inbox they are processed. Gmail’s labels and stars are the keys to my implementation.
I have a label for the statuses of ‘Deferred’, ‘WaitingOn’ and ‘Someday,’ two labels for each open project (Next and Reference) and a label for each context. Statuses have no label prefix, contexts have the bang (!) prefix so they show up first in the list of labels, and projects have an asterisk (*) prefix to distinguish from the statuses. I use projects less frequently than traditional GTD implementations because many Projects can be managed quite effectively with the thread capability of Gmail without having to assign a label (using only contexts).
I use the stars to denote the Next action. Since many of my projects wind up with just a context associated with them, the title essentially becomes the “project folder name” and each action associated with the project is a different email in the thread. A star can be associated with any email in the thread and lets me know what the next action is.
Today’s GTD with Gmail advantage is this: I use the same Gmail account for all of my email, so all email coming in follows the same standard GTD process. No open loops: How happy it makes me. Tomorrow, we’ll finish the processing phase and talk about some new tricks.
April 22nd, 2005 at 10:09 am
Man this is awesome bust some ass and get the third article out. I am loving it.
Thanks
Mike
April 22nd, 2005 at 11:57 am
If an email I’ve received needs action I’ll forward it to myself and put the Next Action in the subject line - that way I don’t have to read the whole message again if I don’t want to. Too few people harness the awesome power of the subject line.
Looking forward to the next post on GTD and Gmail.
April 22nd, 2005 at 12:25 pm
I agree with Ben C. Most of my todo emails don’t have anything in the message body, in fact.
Interesting idea about using threading for projects — but then you don’t get the aforementioned “awesome power of the subject line”. Usually I’ll use threading for follow-up actions, or a history trail. For instance, if I have a todo to call someone, but get their voice mail, I’ll add the message to the “waiting for” label, forward it to myself, and put “left message” or something similarly informative in the message body.
April 25th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
Suppose you use POP3 to retrieve your Gmail. Is there any way to star your email that way or does the web-based approach work best?
April 25th, 2005 at 7:16 pm
Steven:
Web based is certainly best for me, but if you use a pop mail reader that has some sort of flagging system you could use that.
April 27th, 2005 at 1:11 pm
great ideas to harness the power of Gmail, and i’m a GTD conscientious objector
a minor design suggestion as i go through your posts: a ‘home’ or ‘top’ link here at the bottom would keep me from having to scroll back up (i came in to these posts from del.icio.us and didn’t go to your main webpage). or just reproduce the same forward and backward navigation you have at the top.
fwiw