I realize that people have a lot of responsibilities in email, and for some people email may even be a majority of their job. I've definitely been in that position. But even if I am spending the majority of my time in Gmail, I still take a hard stance that my personal todos need to live outside of email lest I lose agency over my own priorities.
Snippet: "Would you use a todo list where all your tasks are created by someone else, and you can’t prioritize or rearrange them? Of course not — they’re your tasks, so you should be in control. Using a todo list sorted only by creation time would be incredibly frustrating. But that’s exactly what email is."
[1] https://medium.com/moo-do/were-making-email-a-powerful-todo-...
I've never had (so far) any problem with managing my inbox, but since many can see the clear correlation between email <-> todo list, I'd say you're on to something.
Hey, that's me!
Very interested in this, but only if access to my email stays on my local machine. If there are any cloud servers involved... nope.
Batch Process by Elimination. Google labels/tags + rotating stars + quicklinks is a powerful combination. Quicklinks can search for tag and star combinations. Tags represent substance, and stars represent state. So these lists can be batch processed based on tag + star, with the initial combination automatically set with filters. It helps when you can control email aliases to filter by recipient also.
Minimizing Moving Parts. No threads + a preview pane eliminates back and forth, and when starring or unstarring, the list doesn't remove the message or change it's position, so your frame of reference stays constant. After a bunch of items have been processed, the list updates/shrinks by clicking on refresh or the same quicklink.
It took a while to arrive at this setup, but afterwards it's been impossible to move back to any classic email program. Just visually digesting a constantly changing long list of emails and folders is a lot of work. And that's before you've even gotten started.
Without Calendar integration, it's not even worth my trying, and 14 days is not enough of a trial to learn a new system.
Contact sync as a free feature? Yeah, OK, that's what it's worth to me.
Right now, I use GTD-style tags in my business account and rely almost entirely on my business calendar for scheduling.
Without Calendar integration, I ain't movin'!
What might interest me:
* In the Free plan, offer Calendar and one of either GTD or Kanban (I'll start with GTD), and sync with one email account.
* In a step-up plan, offer either the "other style" or multiple accounts.
* In another step-up, offer everything, including Contact integration.
Then I might be willing to try it. But as it is, while I am unhappy with my ToDo management and really want something that works across multiple systems, without Calendar I won't move.
This looks like exactly the email workflow I've dreamed of (and thought about starting to write countless times, so thank you for actually doing so)
Inbox sort of plays with the idea of building an organization tool on top of email. It focuses on emails being "done" or "not done", it lets you snooze emails to get to inbox zero, it lets you save links from the web as items in your inbox, and it lets you create reminders in your inbox that look like emails but aren't (streamlining the common action of emailing yourself some quick note).
Moo.do seems to take all of this further. Instead of just snoozing an email or letting it sit in your inbox, you can do several other things with it. You can create an outline and move the email into the outline as an action item, optionally assigning a due date as well. Or you can setup a kanban board like Trello and move the email to different columns. Moo.do will automatically derive an agenda from dates on your outline as well.
