My Gmail [GTD] Request
This is the exact text I posted as a suggestion to Gmail:
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I would like, but have no way currently, to be able to organize a set of labels that are time-sensitive. In the principle of Getting Things Done, I'd like to keep my Inbox full of only "messages I've received but not yet dealt with," not those plus "messages I plan to deal with later." A GTD principle would suggest that I should move some emails into a "deal with tomorrow" or a "deal with next week" label, and that those messages should then automatically reappear in my inbox tomorrow, or next week.
The concept then, again, is this: My inbox is used only for messages that must be dealt with "today," whether they are read or yet unread. The goal is to empty the inbox every day either by dealing with messages directly or by moving them into a "tomorrow" or "next week" label.
The beauty of this is that it can be implemented without ANY forced change to the way people currently organize their messages. The implementation would likely be in the way of making some sort of "timed" filters, which people can use to do their own organization with many times more power.
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Would you like such a feature?
5 comments:
Wouldn't it be easier to write something that connects to your Gmail account through IMAP and makes these changes for you on a scheduled basis, than to try to convince Google to build this into their system?
Perhaps. I'm skeptical that Google would include it too, but they DID intend to reinvent email in the first place, and just using labels instead of folders was revolutionary in the first place. This idea just extends the labeling functionality, in a sense. It enables people to make for themselves a dynamic, rather than static, organizational system. I think it does go along with Google's mission to "organize the world's information." Do you hear me, Google?
By all means, if anyone has the time, please make this and comment here when you do. I'd probably pay $4 a month for it. :)
Perhaps you should have a look at GTDinbox from http://productivefirefox.com.
Thanks for the suggestion, I checked it out and it doesn't do what I need. I don't want to have any holding area for messages that I need to periodically paw through -- I need to send them off like a boomerang to come back to my inbox and bug me later by themselves.
I started writing a ruby script tool that will do what I need. My first version works without any local datastore, just moving any messages back to the inbox that are "too old" for the specific "folder" -- Tomorrow, Next Week, and Next Month. The next version will remember what it sees and what it moves, in a little sqlite3 database, so it can act more smartly and no message will slip through.
I've made a little package that connects to Gmail IMAP to get the job done. Here's my script. It should work great on Mac or Linux, sorry to you Windows people, it's just not worth the effort!
http://github.com/dcparker/gmailboomerang/tree/master/GmailBoomerang.zip
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