We need a new name for GTDInbox*. And we’d greatly appreciate your help in finding it!

Why the name change?
As we grow we risk outstaying our welcome with GTDInbox. Specially, the ‘GTD’ part – as much as the David Allen Co have been wonderful for letting us use it so long, we’re on thin ice trademark wise. Our name could be taken away from us at anytime**, and as such it’s one of those uncertainties that keeps us awake at night – the sooner we can get this sorted, the sooner we can bound forward with confidence.

Narrowing the naming choices

Above all else, it must feel good to say and read. (’GTDInbox’ isn’t actually a very warm name, although it’s likable enough). Something we can all be proud of.

Ideally it would be aspirational, or at least represent/suggest what it can do for you. A good way of doing this is to identify a problem (email overload, out of control email, forgetting email, no help dealing with email tasks) and have a name that quickly describes a fix.

There are no constraints on it being descriptive, imagery-based, or plain weird. Almost any name can be made to work with the right tagline and descriptive text, although misleading descriptive names are an obvious no no. If the name is descriptive, it ought to include reference to ‘email’ as that’s what makes it special.

The imagery the name should conjure up

Master your email environment to catch the opportunities, complete tasks or pass them on to others to be completed. Have the power and control to take advantage of things that come through your inbox each day.

Become a better communicator and earn the appreciation of your peers. Get more done to get ahead. And simplify your life so you can achieve more.

We’ve been looking at email all wrong. It’s not a traditional letter exchange format for simple communication. It’s a flow of tasks that directly influence how we work and how we connect with people. The product is a transformative/perspective change: emails are not letters, emails are tasks.

Our Internal Shortlist

It’s a mix of descriptive and distinctive.

The front runners:

> TaskMail

> TaskInbox

> Porus

Others in consideration:

> Taskify

> MailWorks

> MailTasks

> Kuleana

Your thoughts?

We have really struggled with names because we’re very deep focused into the product. The old “can’t see the wood for the trees” problem. We really need a fresh perspective.

If you’d like to help us,
1) Of the proposed names, what works for you? What would you enjoy using? What do you really dislike? Do you prefer descriptive or distinctive names?
2) This is more challenging, but what name would you give it? (If anyone comes up with a great name we can use, you’ll get free Pro for life – that’s how much we appreciate the help!)

Footnotes
* The name change does not represent a move away from our GTD foundations. GTD is and will be the core.
** Anyone who’s been with us for a very very long time will remember we were originally called GTDGmail, until Google lawyers got involved

Usability / Prettiness Updates

We concentrated on the labels boxes – both the sidebar popouts (e.g. Projects/Contexts) and the dropdown selectors when viewing conversations. The aim was to make it easier to apply labels and browse the nested hierarchy – which we did by making it more ’solid’ in feel, easier on the eyes, and fixes several irritating glitches (like the dropdown hiding before you finished labeling) .

Following the first of the good blog discussions, we’ve changed the Popup Browser to use real statuses in the tabs (instead of inflexible predefined tabs, like To Do/Waiting On/Some Day).

Bug Fixing

We got through a lot!

With particular thanks to Vassili Novikov, Dieter Pfieffer, Jason Wohlstadter, Luciano and everyone else who pinged us about issues they were having… well, we’ve cleaned up so much it would be very boring if I listed them all! Some of the bigger things included a few remaining internationalisation issues, several disruptive loading bugs and many glitches that affected overall email enjoyment.

Saving mention of Michael Bond until last – he deserves particularly high praise for helping us overcome a serious problem! There’s a big change in Gmail (one of the ones that majorily disrupts GTDInbox), and it was starting to affect users – but it hadn’t yet reached any of my accounts…. so there was no way for me to fix it. Michael took a big leap of trust and granted me temporary access to his account, so the bugs could be cleared up, and as a consequence hopefully no one else will suffer any downtime now. Thanks Michael!

The Website

There is a new Support page up, as well as a big overhaul to the website at large. It will continue to be refined as we better define where GTDInbox is headed.

Coming Next

We seriously need to start work on the Pro version as we’re very keen to expand the team and accelerate development. More on that next week.

I’ve also started looking at Google Chrome… and here’s the great news – it looks like a port will be possible. (For a while, because of a few technical difficulties, it was seriously in doubt – this is a huge relief).

Finally, we’ll just be pressing on and refining the features to make them more useable/functional. There are things we would have liked to put into A22, but just couldn’t fit in before the deadline. They’ll be coming shortly!

However, before we even start, it would be wonderful to get a good understanding of how you use GTDInbox.

With a clear idea of your ultimate goals that you want GTDInbox to help you with, we can hopefully create the right features first time. (Which would be wonderful – it means you get things faster and we don’t waste precious resources on the wrong thing!).

So…
What is the main benefit you want GTDInbox to give you?

I’m expecting some diverse answers! And it’s okay – straight forward or bizarre, it’ll be great to know.

Update #1
As mentioned in a comment below, I’ve got a 2nd question for everyone using Gmail for general GTD: What is it that makes Gmail so desirable for task management?

In the original article, there is a study on two lab rats. The first rat receives food after a fixed number of lever presses. The second rat receives food after a random number of presses. Fixed delivery vs variable delivery.

Intuition would say that the first setup is more addictive, as the rat with fixed delivery can predict and learn that pressing the lever results in food. As he wants more food, he will keep pressing.

But here’s the rub… as soon as the food stopped being dispensed, it was the second rat that kept pressing the lever for a very long time (whereas the first rat quickly gave up). It was addicted by the promise that food could arrive ‘any time now’.

Unfortunately for us, it’s the second rat who has the most email like experience… Replace ‘food’ with ‘new email’, and ‘lever’ with ‘opening/switching-to Gmail’, and you can most probably relate to the study. Conclusion? Email is a Variable Reinforcement Machine.

The heart of the issue is that, despite complaints about email overload, new email is rewarding. It can randomly deliver interesting news and opportunities from beloved contacts. The Variable Reinforcement Machine theory shows why the random nature of email makes checking for that reward so compulsive (even if the reward only rarely arrives).

The second addictive ‘hit’, the one that completes the cycle, is the reward of replying. It’s perhaps harks back to our school days – an opportunity to please teacher – or just the basic human gratification of helping someone else, that means we take pleasure in imaging how much joy our reply will bring the recipient. And so reply we do. And the act of replying brings in more email, and so the cycle repeats.

The real harm to all this checking is the damage to our attention. The inability to easily return our focus back to what we were doing before we checked. (In GTD terms, it’s a “context shift”, and that’s mentally expensive). That’s where the addiction truly hurts us.

The question that’s most interesting to our group is, do you control how often you check email? And if so, why + how? (Reasons not to limit checking would also be very interesting).

This is particularly aimed at anyone who has nested/folder-esque projects and sub projects  - e.g. P/GTDInbox/Ideas. How do you do you structure your project and sub-project labels? What is your process for deciding how to categorise? How do you review those projects?

I know in my case, I use P/GTDInbox/Ideas and P/GTDInbox/Bugs, but P/GTDInbox itself is quite redundant. It’s just a convenient way to organise (and hide) my labels.

It raises a really interesting question, which is, should we be doing more with P/GTDInbox? If, on the GTDInbox sidebar, I click P/GTDInbox, I actually expect search results that include that label and all its children (I.e. “label:p-gtdinbox OR label:p-gtdinbox-ideas OR label:p-gtdinbox-bugs“). I certainly think it makes more sense, but it is quite different to the Gmail approach, and therefore I wonder if there is a use case that it would be bad for – the only one I can think is where you are using the parent label for some purpose, and only want to view it on its own.

(I’d also really appreciate any examples where your parent labels – as with my P/GTDInbox – are regularly used even though they have more specific child labels?)

Our problem with the old forum was that, for features and bug reports at least, it was too messy and unstructured for us to easily process. Ideas/bug-reports were getting lost in the noise.

But, it’s clear that in losing the forum we lost a little bit of community too. Clearly, the forum was enabling discussion beyond simple feature/bug submission, and it was short-sighted to let that go.

So, the forum is back at http://www.gtdinbox.com/forum/

Hopefully UserVoice will still be the first choice for reporting and voting on specific items, and the forum will be for sharing tips and more general discussion.

PSA over

This was a big bug fixing effort. Some problems with internationalisation, several problems for new users (+ some new niceties for them too), problems if you actually achieved inbox zero (that was a particular ironic delight!), the Force Above Chat checkbox that didn’t work on Windows and a few smaller issues for good measure.

I condensed the ‘Quick Views’ and ‘Label Categories’ into a single pane, ‘Reviews’. I was never happy with the use of Statuses in the Label Categories as it did not make sense alongside a bulb. Hopefully you’ll find the new layout much more elegant, as well as flexible.

Finally, we’re not done yet – I think there will be another release this week. I wanted to get this out as fast as possible though, because the bugs were frankly tiresome for everyone

http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

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.

We’ve thought about this on and off over the years, and even flirted with the idea of creating standalone tasks within our system.

But, it has just never made sense to us.

Tasks buried in email are unique creatures. They are fast flowing, they are small, they are often half defined and part of a bigger picture. Most are quick to solve, and a significant number require collaboration with others to solve (delegate, ask for help, etc.). They are simply not traditional tasks; and therefore do not cleanly fit into traditional task management systems.

I think the point is, it is economically senseless to try and create a task for every email (or every couple of emails). It requires considerable effort – and therefore time – to think up a task name, to connect it with the email, and to manage it. The reality is that most email tasks are processed too quickly to make that effort worthwhile. We just want to say “this email is an action, don’t let me forget it, help me understand where it fits in, and help me respond better”.

The one arguable benefit of creating separate tasks is to help understand where individual emails fit into the bigger picture. But GTD gives us a clean and simple mechanism for that: Projects. Your projects are descriptions of tasks (P/CreateForecastForPete). And in Gmail, labels fit far more quickly – and flexibly – into your workflow than cumbersome separate tasks.

Put simply, our mantra of “emails are actions” is not about to change. Nor is our desire to stay lightweight and in harmony with Gmail. It’s not for everyone, but it’s simple, it’s fast, it requires minimal effort and it’s the optimal – native – solution for effective, organized communication.

(I should make it clear I’m not against traditional task managers. But I am saying email is a different beast and requires something better suited to its true nature. Certainly, for some kinds of task buried in email it makes sense to ‘export’ them to a bigger system. Just not the majority.).

If so, please reply in the comments here, or drop me an email (andy@gtdinbox.com) today, and I will try and work with you to get it fixed.

It would be  a great help if you include details from the troubleshooting bit in the FAQ (see ‘GTDInbox has stopped working, what do I do?’).