GTDinbox review
Update: 18 June 2010 – GTDinbox was recently renamed ActiveInbox for legal reasons. There have also been new features added. I’m not going to rewrite this review but check the GTDinbox/ActiveInbox home page for details.
For the past two months, I’ve been using a task management tool called GTDinbox. I installed GTDinbox based on the recommendation as a colleague. Overall, I’ve been pleased with GTDinbox and plan to continue using it but it’s not a perfect tool. I installed GTDinbox based on the recommendation as a colleague. Overall, I’ve been pleased GTDinbox and plan to continue using it but I would not say that it’s a perfect tool.
GTDinbox is implemented as a FireFox add-on. Its rather ambitious goal is to turn “Gmail into a unique task manager to effectively manage your inbox, reduce email overload and maintain inbox zero.” Unlike services such as RememberTheMilk which, has it’s own cloud backend, GTDinbox builds on top of Gmail. This is a somewhat unusual approach but Gmail has a number of features making it a good basis for a task manager. Gmail offers free network accessible secure cloud storage that can be accessed through any web browser or less eloquently through any IMAP client. Additionally, many tasks begin life as emails. Thus integration with Gmail means that these tasks don’t have to be reentered into a new system.
Once you download and install the GTDinbox FireFox add-on, GTDinbox modifies the Gmail UI. When you view an email, 4 buttons appear at the top of it allowing you assign the email a status by marking it is as either Action, Waiting On, Some Day, or Finished. You can also assign emails to a contexts — e.g. “home”, “work”, etc. –, projects, or references. GTDinbox adds a box to the side bar that allows you to view tasks by Project, Context, or Status. Once you have categorized the email, you can safety archive it to clear up your inbox and then use GTDinbox to track it.
Internally, GTDinbox works by assigning labels to emails. Context labels start with C/ e.g. C/Home or C/Work. Project labels start with P/. And status labels start with S/. While these labels have special meanings to GTDinbox they are also regular Gmail labels. When viewing a message, the GTDinbox label will show up just like other labels. This approach is simple yet it works surprisingly well. I also really like the transparency that comes from using Gmail labels as the basis of the system. When you view active tasks within a context or project, GTDinbox simply displays a Gmail search page using the labels as search criteria. For example, the following search string is used for the home context “label:c-home (label:s-action OR label:s-some-day OR label:s-waiting-on) -label:s-finished”. This means that you have less reason to worry about losing your task data. Even if GTDinbox stopped working, you could still access your tasks directly by viewing labels within Gmail. It also means that you can manipulate your tasks from any mail client. Obviously accessing and manipulating your tasks this way is a lot less fun but at least it’s possible. For example, I will often manually move order shipment emails to the S/Waiting-on label using my smart phone.
Other features
Want to enter a task that doesn’t come from an email? GTDinbox adds a “Compose Personal” link. This is like the standard “Compose Mail” except that it adds the email directly to your inbox. You can then label the email as a task just like an outside email. “Compose Personal” is also useful for sending notes to your smart phone. Now instead of writing down an address or room number, I’ll often just use “Compose Personal” so I can access it by viewing email on my smart phone.
Downsides
Software Environment
GTDinbox requires that you use Gmail. Most people use Gmail as at least one of their personal email accounts so this is not a huge burden. However, when tasks originate as emails to other accounts such as a work email, some of the convenience of GTDinbox is lost. You must forward the email to Gmail or enter it manually using “Compose Personal” — much less eloquent approaches.
GTDinbox is a FireFox add-on so you must use FireFox to access Gmail in order to use it. This may not seem like a big deal — everyone uses Firefox — but it means that you can’t use tools such as PRISM with GTDinbox. I’ve found PRISM to be a more streamlined way to access Gmail than Firefox, however I stopped using it in order to use GTDinbox. Additionally, you must have permissions on the computer you’re using to install add-ons into Firefox. This may be a problem if you frequently access your email from public computers in places such as school computer labs or Internet cafes. There, it is likely that you will either be unable to install the GTDinbox add-on because Firefox is locked down or you will have to reinstall it every time you access Gmail. For security reasons, I no longer access Gmail from untrusted computers so this has not been an issue for me.
Functional Limitations
Often, the same task involves multiple emails. For example, a single online order may involve 3 or more emails: order confirmation, payment confirmation, and shipment confirmation. I usually mark all emails related to an order as Waiting-On until I receive the item. Unfortunately GTDinbox provides no way to combine multiple emails into a single meta-task. Thus these three emails will show up as three unrelated tasks. This limitation is compounded by the fact that you can’t manage tasks within the message list view. You must click through to the full message to mark a task as finished or assign it to a project or context.
NO Tickler
Using a tickler file to defer tasks until a certain data and then process them in your inbox is one of the core pieces of GTD. My biggest complaint, about GTDinbox is that there is no way to tell it that you want to defer a task until a certain day and have it hide the task until that time. The closest thing that GTDinbox offers is marking a task as “Some Day” but “Some Day” tasks still show up in context and project views.
Emails Not Assigned a Status Are Untracked
This is one of the things that tripped me up when I first started using GTDinbox. GTDinbox will not track an email unless you must assign it a status — by marking it is as either Action, Waiting On, Some Day, or Finished. Assigning the email to a project or context is not sufficient. Once I became aware of this limitation, it wasn’t a big deal. Still it seems like something that could be fixed.
Can’t edit Email tasks.
GTDinbox is based on Gmail and thus inherits its limitations. Gmail does not let you edit emails and for normal email this makes sense. However, if you enter a task using compose personal and want to add a note or correct something there is no way to do this. The best you can do is to reply to the email or mark the email task as finished and then create a new task with the changes.
Not maintained or endorsed by Google.
GTDinbox relies on editing the html of Gmail to add it’s enhancements. Although, Google does not do anything to overtly block GTDinbox, it does occasionally change Gmail. Sometimes these changes are enough to break GTDinbox. When this happens, the creators of GTDinbox are usually quick to release a version that fixes things. I’ve only been without a working GTDinbox briefly. To minimize down time, install GTDinbox from the Firefox add-on page rather than the GTDinbox site so you get auto-updated.
Conclusions
I’ve tried various methods of task management and so far GTDinbox is the best I’ve found. But it is not a perfect tool. Piggy backing off of another service means that it’s less polished. I get the sense that GTDinbox could be truly amazing if it was acquired by Google and baked into the fabric of Gmail. Still there is much to be said for the simplicity and transparency of it’s design. It’s a great tool for taming your inbox and managing tasks. Some people swear by paper task lists or local text files. But if you’re looking for a cloud based task management system, GTDinbox is well worth trying.
Very helpful comments.
Hi David,
First, let me thank you for your review. I’m not going to flatter you, but you’re obviously a smart guy with a lot of insight. So, I will share some of my ideas with you about how to improve GTDInbox. Maybe you can give us somew good ideas foir development!
First, let me say that we are already working on features that will implement many of the shortcomings you have pointed out.
Second, I will add that we have figured out workarounds, since those of us who live in email and GTDInbox need immediately effective tools.
I’m going to follow the outline of your excellent blog post and respond to each item in term.
1. We agree that GTDInbox is far from perfect. As our website says, it’s in preview mode.
2. I agree that our approach is quite unusual. We see it as a paradigm shift. While many people live in email and many businesses live and die in email, most folks still see email as an ephemeral tool (despite Sarbanes-Oxley). We see email as the center of most professional relationships and think that the smart thing to do is to structure one’s workflow so that email is at the center and then build from there. That’s a lot of why we chose GMail as a platform.
3. GMail labels and transparency. We like this, too. It means that people can use GTDInbox from their phones or any place with rudimentary Internet access. I use it via my Blackberry plug-in and via my GMail mobile plug-in. I also use it from various secure though public terminals. Even though GTDInbox isn’t installed on any of these in the sense of providing full GTDInbox functionality, I can get by with it. And when I get back to my laptop, hich has GTDInbox installed, I don’t have to spend hours attaching emails to contacts, etc. I’m quickly ready to move ahead.
4. Compose Personal. We have recently changed the default address of Compose Personal from GmailUserName+action@gmail.com to GmailUserName+self@gmail.com. We rolled this out with GTDInbox Plus Beta. We did this so users would see that they didn’t have to limit the messages they sent to themselves to actionables. They could send notes or anything else. I use this a lot to take notes on phone calls and meetings, as well as to send myself tasks.
5. Tasks involving multiple email threads. Grouping multiple emails into a functional group on the fly. I handle this by using GMail labels. For instance, if I have an order from Company X. That is, if they have sent me a PO, I create a label called P/Company X/PO #123 or whatever. (In truth, for myself, I usually categorize customers as C/ so the label would be C/Company X…) I then apply this label to all communications regarding this particular PO. When the PO is fulfilled and paid for, I mark it as Old so GTDInbox doesn’t keep it in any of the views I use every day. Periodically, I review these Old labels and merge them with the next level up. That is, I would merge P/Company X/PO #123 into P/Company X so I didn’t end up with thousands of GMail labels. I average between 300 and 400 GMail labels so I try to keep this under control.
We are working on a feature that will provide this kind of connectivity between threads in a more intuitive way, but for the moment, this is how I do it, and it works quite well.
6. No tickler. We are working on a feature that will provide tickler functions, so you can tell GTDInbox that you want to be reminded in 3 days, or a week, or two week, or in a month, etc. without looking at a calendar. This should be part of a future GTDInbox Plus Beta release within a few months from now.
Meanwhile, here’s a workaround that I use. Go into your Options or Preferences box (depending on whether you are on Free or Plus). Create a new category called Due. Assign it D/ as a prefix. Now go into GMail labels and create a series of labels as follows:
D/Day 01
D/Day 02
…
D/Day 31
D/Month 01 January
D/Month 02 February
…
D/Month 12 December
This will give you a 43 folders tickler system. If you enable the Google Labs feature that puts your Google Calendar into your sidebar for easy reference, this works.
7. Tracking Emails without Statuses. If you need to track emails but want to assign only project or context statuses to them, you can create a category for that via the options/preferences box.
8. Can’t edit email tasks. This is built into GMail. I assume their thinking is that allowing recipients of correspondence to edit said correspondence would make such correspondence useless. Allowing recipients to edit emails could potentially create some confusion about what each correspondent actually said.
I have found that sending emails to myself as part of a thread (but without sending these private messages to anyone else) has given me a practical way to add my comments, assign myself tasks, etc., without duplicating effort in a separate task management system and without necessarily divulging my thoughts and intentions to others participating in the thread.
9. Not maintained or endorsed by Google. GTDInbox is an entirely independent software company. However, while Google and Mozilla don’t endorse our work, they give us their fullest cooperation.
Thank you, again! Please let me know if I may be of any service.
Best,
Peyton