GTD and gmail, anyone using it?

[SF_Chris]

My company is moving over to Goggle docs, etc. Has anyone been successful with gmail and GTD? It appears that you can only lable email messages and not create new folders. It's probably doable but has anyone done it?

 

[sidsavara]

GTD Inbox

You may want to consider GTDInbox:

http://www.gtdinbox.com/

A friend of mine uses it and loves it - I use outlook so I can't personally comment on it, but it may be what you are looking for.

Off topic: I need to sync with my BlackBerry though, so that's why I use outlook. I use Jello Dashboard for it and it works great.

 

[joefaga]

GTDInbox!

Definitely the way to go. features are excellent and continue to get better - requires use of firefox browser, though.

I tried several tools and systems before settling on GTDInbox as my tool of choice for list processing, along with Evernote for general capture

-Joe

 

[MarinaMartin]

My company is moving over to Goggle docs, etc. Has anyone been successful with gmail and GTD? It appears that you can only lable email messages and not create new folders. It's probably doable but has anyone done it?

It takes a little while to wrap your head around it, but a label *is* a folder - just a different word for it. Multiple labels means the same email can be in multiple folders without having to copy it.

Get the GMail Macros Greasemonkey script here:
http://blog.persistent.info/2007/11/macros-for-new-version-of-gmail.html

This adds additional keyboard shortcuts so you can fly through your email. With few exceptions, I can process anything in my inbox with three keystrokes.

I star items that I need to process, and clear out my starred items at least once per week (during my weekly review). I keep an @WAITINGON label for emails I'm waiting on a response for, or purchase confirmations I'm waiting to arrive, etc.

Marina

 

[mcogilvie]

My company is moving over to Goggle docs, etc. Has anyone been successful with gmail and GTD? It appears that you can only lable email messages and not create new folders. It's probably doable but has anyone done it?

It's very doable. Tags map to folders under imap (you are using imap, aren't you?), so there's no real issue. Kelly Forrister and Wayne Pepper wrote a nice article on using gmail for gtd, which I used with my iPhone until the 2.0 update.

http://www.davidco.com/coaches_corner/Kelly_Forrister/article78.html

 

[DanGTD]

It takes a little while to wrap your head around it, but a label *is* a folder - just a different word for it. Multiple labels means the same email can be in multiple folders without having to copy it.

The main difference would be that you cannot move items between labels, like you could with folders. You have to label the item, and then drop the old label. Two actions instead of one.

 

[jesig]

Although I liked some of the features of GTD Inbox (it made the "switching labels" thing a lot easier for one) for some odd reason the combo of Inbox and FF3 made Gmail lose the ability to allow me to pick new colors for my labels. Since I'm super visual and love the colors, I uninstalled Inbox.

It's totally possible to have a GTD system in Gmail without the add-on. All you have to do is simply label your messages. I use the same old labels--@action, @waiting for, @maybe. I archive and label reference messages, and keep all status messages in my inbox--my real "inbox" in the GTD sense is the top of my screen where the most recent, untagged messages are. Some people archive everything, including their @action and @waiting for e-mails--it's a preference thing. If you archive, then you'll need to click on "@action" to see your actions, but it does give you that beautiful "inbox zero" feeling. One thing I like about keeping my e-mails in the inbox, though, is that after 50 messages I have to go to another page. And if I've got more than 50 actions and waiting fors, it's a signal for me that something is amiss with my system--either I'm procrastinating on some some short-but-longer than 2 min replies or my Waiting Fors need to become "@action--follow up"s. If you frequently have more than 50 e-mail NAs, then maybe you'll want to archive.

Oooh oooh! I forgot one other thing. In g-mail, you can create unlimited e-mail addresses that go to the same box by following your gmail handle with "+text." Then you can write rules about how to deal with e-mail coming to yourname+text@gmail.com as opposed to yourname @ gmail.com Send an e-mail to "yourname+action@gmail.com" and have gmail automatically label those e-mails @action. It's pretty.