GTD with Gmail (Part III)
For the second half of the processing phase of GTD with Gmail (make sure you read parts I and II first), we’ll discuss how the Gmail inbox is identical to David Allen’s vision of the GTD inbox and how processing and organization nearly become one seamless step.
“In to Empty” is the main idea (I’m trying not to make this too much of a general GTD lesson). When I leave the Gmail inbox by closing the browser or navigating away it must be empty. This works out well because each item has been labeled with the appropriate context, project, and/or status labels, trashed* or starred. Once I’ve applied these mechanics to each item, I archive it and my organization is nearly taken care of (recall the outer 8 categories of organization from David’s workflow diagram).
The only portion of organization that still remains is the “trash collection” that must occur with Gmail. Items in completed projects can be assigned a context label and that project’s labels can be removed to make navigation of active projects easier. One of Google’s strengths is searching and Gmail is no different. The reference material is usually a few keystrokes away, and if I use the specialized “context-based” label searches along with good language mechanics in my email items I can optimize these searches.
I’m going to take a break for the weekend and come back with Part IV of GTD with Gmail: Review and Do, which we’ll blast through quickly. After these short theory based articles I’m going to put the whole thing into practice with some real examples in a how-to article. I appreciate all of the comments, tracebacks and linking. Traffic to this site has increased by an order of magnitude in the past few days and the more brains that get wrapped around processes, the more good ideas come about. Be sure to read the comments as well. I’m certainly not the first person to do this and there are lots of excellent variations on ideas. Have a great weekend.
*We haven’t really talked much about trash but it doesn’t make sense to trash anything that isn’t absolute garbage. If the information may be useful sometime in the future, keep it. With Gmail old items won’t get in the way like they can in paper-based systems and can always be found with a simple keyword search. Embrace the power that google is giving us (for free, in fact).
April 23rd, 2005 at 12:36 am
Gmail certainly is the most powerful, free organizational application I’ve come across in a while. For the mobility, versatility and search function alone it can’t be beat.
Only one thing I haven’t found a solution for yet: Backups. In the unlikely event that Gmail goes belly-up or, decides to charge exhorbitant fees for the service or, is found to be less than secure just as the critics have warned — how should we have backed up our entire brain’s inbox? I just started on the Gmail thing little over a month ago but I already have a lot in the archives that needs to be backed up somehow, somewhere other than Gmail.
If I had been thinking right I should have been automatically forwarding every message to my ISP email as a kind of “unsearchable” backup, but — *groan* Just hoping I don’t have to do each one, one at a time now…
April 23rd, 2005 at 5:18 pm
T. Eden: you could always pop Gmail. You lose the labels and everything but in the event that something happens, at least you retain your email.
April 24th, 2005 at 6:27 pm
Ok, I am loving this. Got all my labels, processing through the thoughts, ideas, projects, nextactions, etc. I even added labels for 1, 2 and 3 priorities for next actions. For instance, I have project xxx that has action1 so on the email I stick projectx label on it, then a nextaction label goes on it, then if I want to break it down into priority I stick a 1, 2 or 3 label on it. Then if I wanna see what needs to be done I just search like this:
label:projectx label:nextactions label:1
nice little list of what has to get done appears,
Once its done, I just switch the nextactions label with a done label and I retain the context and priority so I can report back to project managers…
Hey punk, I got xxx number of high priority items done on your project this weekend so KMA.
My next step is figuring out how to get this in to the HPDA… or some other analog system so when I am off line I still retain the system… Also I am thinking about how to do this with a cellphone, shoot myself an email or send a voicemail to my gmail account and vice versa…
Oh, and another thing… There is a great firefox extension for saving searches in gmail. So you can prewrite those searches that you are going to need and save some typing or thinking later on. here is a link to that booger…
http://persistent.info/archives/2005/03/01/gmail-searches
Keep up the good work man. This think has seriously got me jump started on GTD I think. Let me know if I am doing anything patently wrong.
Thanks again Bryan for this great article,
Mike512
April 24th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
While I’m extremely behind the times in that I don’t actually have a cell phone, I have thought many times about how cool it would be to be able to read my Gmail on my phone and use it as a PDA by emailing things to myself… Of course, until POP readers support Gmail labels, or the web browsers on phones actually let you read email without squinting, I’m holding out.
April 25th, 2005 at 7:10 am
I think I figured out how to get items from GTDMail into my HPDA. Actually I have several options.
1. Pencil & Notecard - Primary source of data entry in HPDA
2. Print, Fold & Clip - Additional source of HPDA input. This is kinda like a consumable web service. I just print out my next actions list, fold it into 1/4th’s and viola, info imported.
Sometimes I can be rather dense when it comes to be organized. I find myself worrying more about the process rather than GTD.
Thanks again,
Mike
April 25th, 2005 at 10:45 am
Stars work well for me as a ‘next action’ indicator. In every project label, there should be exactly one starred item indicating the next action for that project. So I can slice my stuff quickly in three dimensions: project, context, and all next actions (the ’starred’ label). My GTD review (which I don’t do as often as I should) consists of blasting through all my labels, starting with ‘@Work’ or ‘@Home’ or whatever context I’m currently in, going down in priority as far as I have time.
I don’t often need to take hard copies with me. I find that just organizing everything helps me to remember what needs to be done, without bogging down my brain (is that cheating?). However, if I was going out shopping and needed a list, a simple printout of the ‘@Errands’ context would suffice.
April 25th, 2005 at 4:04 pm
Nice! It would be so great if you showed some screen shots with your setup, (with faked/dummy-data of course)
April 30th, 2005 at 8:22 pm
Isn’t there a downside to keeping trash in gmail? After using the GTD+gmail system for months, I speculate that the amount of email that is trash will approach 99%. Then using a gmail search for something runs the high risk of returning many trash emails. How do you propose to filter these searches out? Do you keep all the trash in a “trash bin” folder, that you can exclude from the searches?
May 1st, 2005 at 4:37 pm
One good thing about GTD + Gmail is that with labels, you can have an action sitting in the many places it can be done (!Home and !Office).
But then what happens when you do the action? If you have the email for the action with multiple labels, trashing it will get rid of the email from all labels. But if you have a “Done” label, “moving” the email there, will only add the label of done to the email, leaving the !Home and !Office labels. What is a good way to remove all labels but also label the email as “Done”, in a quick step? Right now, I’m clicking through the mulitple labels to remove them individually, which is a hassle.
October 7th, 2005 at 12:42 am
i have never used FutureMail, but one way to get the same tickler-type acion is to email yourself messages containing “upcMMdd”, where upc stands for “upcoming event” and MMdd is the target month and date.
then every day you just search upcToday’sDate, just like you were checking your physical tickler file, and up pops your reminder for dinner w aunt Judy.
also “rep” works for repeating events such as Vaccum the LvgRm.
example, one of mine says, in the subject field:
“rep9 rep19 rep29 bed linens”
because changing my linens is the sort of thing that even if i don’t *do* every ten days, at least I’m reminded of it.
May 17th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
milkshake, i’m myticklerfile.com is a much better way of implementing a tickler system via email. an email with the information you want specified is sent to your inbox on a pre-determined day/time. easier than having to proactively search for your tickler info.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Thank you