All over the web people are raving about their success with Getting Things Done (or GTD). I read this article about using gMail labels for GTD, and I copied the idea. It's working really well, and I wanted to pass it along, so that others might take advantage of it as well.
The idea is simple. The inbox is for receiving, not for storage. When something comes into your inbox, you either ...
- Do it if it takes less than two minutes (no procrastinating here)
- File it, to be done at the appropriate time
The latter is very important, and requires discipline. If something could take 10 minutes, you might be tempted to side track and just do it, after all - what's 10 minutes? Well in developer time, that could easily turn into hours. So you need to finish the task at hand. Which is simply clear the inbox.
When I delegate an email, I flag it with @Waiting (it being the sent mail) - so I can easily follow up with tasks assigned to others, to make sure the "Getting" in GTD are really happening when I'm counting on others.
The other thing I like about the GTD filing system, is the rolling calendar months. When you have an email that pertains to something that will happen later this year, you simply flag it with that month. Then at the beginning of each month, you transition all the monthly items into actions, and change the month label to next year. You see in the screen shot that Jan/Feb/Mar are in 2009, and the rest of the year is in 2008, because Q1 has already rolled to 2009. I use YYYY Mmm format, so that they sort nicely.
I'm not using the exact GTD terminology, because I wanted to see the (XX) marked "unread" counts next to each label. The labels in gMail are sorted alphabetically - so from top to bottom, I conveniently came up with words that are in alpha order that make sense, and are very mnemonic. This is why @Action isn't used, but instead @Needs, simply because @Action would come before my @ASAP, which would be backwards.
As the links article talks about - i prefix the gMail labels with @ simply so they show at the top of the list of labels.
Lastly, the color labels are nice, but meaningless. Well I guess they serve a purpose when you do a search. The results that match your search criteria - will show the label - and that might draw more attention to the search result. As it is, when I "click" the label @ASAP - I see a list of all the @ASAP messages, and gMail is smart enough not to waste the screen real estate and restate the obvious. I do like the darker solid colors when they do appear (as aforementioned in search results) because then it's white font over a dark background, where conversely if you choose a light color, it's a dark font over a white background, which just doesn't stand out as much. I would like it more if gMail would let me pick my own colors, rather than from a limited color palette - buy hey - you can't have everything!