I’m thinking about the Popup. The one used by Overview, Label Browser and Contact Browser to see active items.
Currently, it looks like this:
Popup Active Views (Before)
It’s built this way because the assumption with Statuses is there are only 3 types. 1) Things to be done, 2) Things you are waiting on from others, 3) Things that could be done, but have no priority.
It is also assumed that any custom Status labels that you create can only be of type #1: Things to be done. So the logic is that all statuses (except Waiting On / Some Day) go into ‘To Do’.
The main problem with this, other than it may be slightly confusing for first time users, is that I’m increasingly aware that some people create a fairly unique approach to their Statuses; and our assumptive rules are too inflexible.
So, the alternative possibility is this:
Popup Active Views (After)
Here, each Status has its own tab. The major possible downside is that if people create too many custom Status labels it will become messy and unworkable.
I’d love your input on this, and I think the best question to ask is,
If you have customised your Statuses then how do you use them?
I.e., if you have more Status labels than Action/WaitingOn/SomeDay then please tell us about your workflow.
My own feeling – not to influence your response – is that changing to represent each Status is a good idea. It’s clean, easy to understand, and flexible (and the ‘messy tabs’ concern can be avoided by taking care when creating Status labels).
In case it changes your thoughts, please note that in the future, we will be adding a few bits of functionality related to this:
- The ability to refine (aka ‘drill into’) a view. So, you could be on the ‘To Do’ tab, and then filter that tab to just show ‘Urgent’ items. This is a clean approach, but there is still no permanent visual indication to the number of items in each Status – which you would get with more tabs.
- We could add the ability to sort by Statuses (as you can sort by Projects/Context/Contact now).
So, you could be in the ‘To Do’ tab, and group the items by their Status. The limitation here is that you cannot group by both Project and Status at the same time (which is what Refine/Filter is intended to solve). - We are trying to find alternatives so you do not have to use S/Next Action labels (unless you particularly want to) – e.g. Deadlines, Project/Context/Contact Notes.
I do not customize
Fred –
Ok, it could still be interesting to know whether it would make more sense to you that it would say,
* “To Do”
* “Waiting On”
* “Some Day”
Or,
* “Actions”
* “Waiting On”
* “Some Day”
?
Obviously the second one matches the buttons used throughout GTDInbox more consistently (which is what I’m pushing towards).
I do have customized labels (well, actually just one), but I created it to archive “discarded” tasks, so it’s quite annoying to have tasks with the status “Discarded” into the “To Do” tab… so I’m on the “represent each status” side.
Keep up with the good work!
I use the standard set of status tags, BUT I use the following as contexts:
Day goal (ASAP)
Week goal
Month goal
Quarter goal
Year goal
I find that that gives me a way to organize not just ‘what’s next’ but ‘ what’s next and coming due’
I use custom statues, primarily, to batch process items. For example, one of the things I do on a regular basis is compile information regarding donations given to my employer via credit card, of which we’re given an individual e-mail for each transaction. I have a custom “PendingCC” status that I visit when I’m batch processing these items.
I have a few different things like this that I do, so for the dashboard, it’d be great to create my own buttons based on those “batch” statues.
I thought this might be quite insightful
DarthIA – Is ‘discarding’ not very similar to SomeDay – things that you probably won’t do, but want to keep an eye on anyway?
Sean – that’s a cool approach. I’d like to talk more about scheduling in the future.
Kraft – I’m intrigued as to why you wouldn’t use a Project label for this? I.e. click Action and then associate it with P/PendingCC? For me, Projects contain things moving toward some goal, which is what you’ve described (the goal of processing credit cards). If there’s something we can do to make this possible/easier for you, let me know.
As I subscribe pretty literally to David Allen’s GTD principles, as well as the GTDInbox implementation, I do not customize my Statuses.
I do, however, make extensive use of Projects, Contexts and References. For example, I combine S/Someday with P/Reading List to clear my Inbox of messages containing information that I’d like to read during times that would otherwise be unproductive (e.g. waiting in lines, etc.). By archiving these messages as Unread, the “Hide read labels” feature of Gmail Labs now also gives me a quick visual indicator of items in my Reading List.
As far as the Overview pop-up is concerned, I’d like to see tabs for each and every Status one defines. That’s what I expected when I first used the pop-up. I have problems with the current pop-up due to this lack of consistency, and would find it far more useful if it had tabs for every Status I have.
Thanks for a wonderful, useful tool that just keeps getting better and better.
I currently don’t customize, but have thought about it. I wasn’t sure if everything would be grouped into the Action category, but now I know. Relating to this, I’m wondering why there’s an “action” and a “next action” status. It’s not clear to me what the distinction is, and from what I recall in GTD methodology, there are:
Actionable items
Non-actionable items
and
of the actionable items you have next actions, actions that are part of projects (is this what “action” is meant for?), appointments on a calendar, and waiting for. I guess “action” could also be intended as part of a multi-step task that has one thing that would naturally happen first and so would be deemed “next action.” The problem is that there’s no way to chain things together other than on the project level. But for one project there could be lots of multi-step tasks, yes?
As for whether statuses might grouped into a single to-do or each have their own section, that’s a tough call. Is there any way to provide for subitems under Todo AND allow for other groupings on the same level?
Hi Levi,
I don’t draw a distinction between Next Action and Action (the reason Next Action is there is a legacy of experimentation, and it’s now been removed – unless a user explicitly wants to keep it).
As for multi steps in a project, I am interested in different ways of storing information around a project, as well as pipelining labels (i.e. so you can easily cycle through pre-defined steps); although I think this is different to what you were getting at.
At the moment I have added tomorrow, if I had over view of more statuses I would probably put consideration into exactly what would really work for me. Possibly: Today, This Week, This Month, This Year, One Day & Complete.
At the moment I also use GTD Monkey in tandem with GTDInbox, It would be more efficient if I could dispense with this and have just the one system but the advantage that Monkey has is that you can set a tickler to remind you on a certain day in the future also you can have things set to weekly or monthly reminders. If a time system could be introduced to GTDInbox I could put all these tasks as notes to self. I add this as I know you are looking into scheduling in the future.
Many thanks Andy keep up the excellent work.
There are some eye opening thoughts already posted. It sounds like it should be possible to default to showing all statuses but have a field in the custom status definition to say which if any other status this status should be grouped under. Especially if a drill down is already imminent.
I actually have the same need for context. I may have a C/Office but i also have C/”Persons name”. It would be nice if there was a structure to allow C/Office to automatically be associated to anything that I add to C/”Persons name” if that name is already associated with C/Office.
Andy Thanks for the continued inspiration and excellent ongoing implementation.
I dont customise, but I dont use the summary very much either. I have the gmail addod “multiple inboxes” set to display action items an dthen “waiting on” items in their own inbox below my gmail ones.
DarthIA – I like that idea of ‘discarded’.
In my line of work, I get lots of requests that even before I look at them get canceled. I’ve been just lumping them in with Finished, but now that I’ve read your post, I think I can see a use at least for myself to add a ‘S/Canceled’. The upside is that’ll make it something I can track and report on, and hopefully use to beat a few customers into submission, that wasting my time is not a joke.
BTW Andy, and team, keep up the great work!
I have made Today into a status but I try to do most categorizing with projects and contexts to avoid introducing unnecessary ambiguity into my workflow decision making process. But I think separate tabs would be an improvement since they would allow more customizing by end users.
I use a custom status. The status Read-Review is for things that I need or want to study, but are not necessarily actions. These might be newsletters or articles requiring time and thought, but have no deadline. These are great when I am on a plane and not connected to the internet.
I have added “follow up”, “meeting topic” and “read. I have a lot of projects where I get status reports that need attention, but they aren’t right now actions or waiting on items. And I use someday for longer term items that would be good to do, but don’t have deadlines. Meeting topic is a gathering point for items to bring up at staff meetings or to gather information on for a meeting. I use that with “action” if I need to get something together for a meeting. “Read” is for reports that I get that have to be read, but are not immediate items. I like to keep them up front so I get to them and I found that they cluttered up the “action” section too much.
Great job. Best thing since sliced bread for people that live out of their inbox.
Jim
K.I.S.S.
I don’t use customize the actions -
I wish the to do would go back to the NextAction etc.
I take back what I said before. Using Today as a status created more problems than it solved. I changed it back to a due date. Nevertheless, I think that adding the option of creating custom tabs in the pop-up is a good idea.
I love gmail and the thing that I missed about outlook was the GTD plugin I had from David Allen. The mian thing I miss in your GTD is the scheduling and being able to allocate a message as a task to someone else with a date/reminder to follow up. As a developer myself I know this might be tricky, especially as your app sits on top of googles mail system so you are restrained by that.
I did create a few custom status but after a while dropped them and stuck with the defaults as they work well.
Hi Matt,
I’m intrigued by your point about allocating a message as a task to someone else. How would you ideally like to do this?
This is all fantastic feedback.
One limitation I overlooked before is ’sub statuses’ (e.g. S/Action/SubAction), which would be hard to represent in the new tabs.
But, I think it may be a blessing, as in that case, there would be a single tab (for the parent label), that would combine all child labels. Forgive the techno speak there, as an example -> “Action” would be a tab, but it would include “S/Action and S/Action/SubAction” in the results shown.
There is also the future potential, for power users, to allow entirely custom tabs comprised of manual searches, to combine statuses.
[...] wasn’t intended, but given the insight yielded by the discussion on Statuses, I’m now really interested to know how you structure Projects. I think we can refine our [...]
I use Today, This Week, This Month, and Action. Then I use multiple inboxes feature in labs so that my real inbox is on top, then below that “today” and below that “this week.” I find the prioritization this way makes my to do list much less overwhelming.
I actually like that they all get lumped together under To Do in the overview because periodically I click it and it helps me make sure I’m not missing something I labeled “this month” a month ago.
Thanks so much!
I only customize the “waiting one”, like “waiting – client” and “waiting – internal feedback”. So I have to view the emails directly via the GMail labels list, not the overview.
This thread has finally jarred me into creating a /W for WATCHED that should be handled by someone else but I need to watch and confirm that someone replies within a reasonable amount of time. This allows me to defer deciding who it will go to until everyone has had an opportunity to step up. I also now have a /N for NEW items I don’t even want to open yet to label. By throwing items that obvioulsy are not work related into /N/Unfiled while i am in the office and doing the same with obvious work related items that can be deferred until morning into /N/Office I finally have and can keep an empty inbox! Thank you everyone for all the insightws and to Andy and his team for organizing it all.
[...] the first of the good blog discussions, we’ve changed the Popup Browser to use real statuses in the tabs (instead of inflexible [...]
Great product, i started to understand much better the GTD system since using GTDInbox. Would like GTDinbox should have an option when clicking or changing label to S/Finished it should remove the context.
I use call, mail, read and print (When I’m out of reach of the printer with my laptop or just don’t want to scurry upstairs to turn it on)
I like to group things by the sort of activity.
I have
Next action
Tomorrow
Next Week
Next Month
Next Semester
Waiting On
Coming Events – this one I’m considering removing/moving to a non-status label
I like to be able to put things into approximate future plans quickly to clear the more immediate schedule efficiently.
One more thing:
It would be nice to be able to order these freely, without having to give them names just to order them (like “1-Next Action”)
Heck yeah…
Urgent and Important
I don’t use Action.
instead of waiting on…
Also waiting on them vs waiting on me
Hi Akien,
Thank you for your insight! It sounds like all your email-based tasks are actionable, so you don’t need to label them as such. For you, the question may be whether each message is urgent, important, and whether you are waiting for someone else to act or waiting until you can act.
This relates to the issue of customizing actionable status labels. GTDInbox provides each user full control over this through the Options box. We will probably rename this as the Preferences box when we roll out GTDInbox Plus Beta, within the next week or so, but the functionality and level of control will remain the same. Each user will be in charge of the labels.
The point is that each person needs to control the labels they use, whether action labels, project labels, or any other labels. While most people find that the default labels and hierarchical labeling schema work for them, many do not. You can easily change the names of your labels and the categories under which they are handled by GTDInbox via the GMail label interface and the GTDInbox options box.
As defaults, we provide labels that we think will work well for most people, in the sense of giving them presets that will help them get their work done. However, we know that these presets won’t work for everyone. That’s why we give each user access to the Options box so each person can adjust labels and categories to suit themselves.
Does this address your comment?