Shockingly, over a year has elapsed since I last spoke about my digital life-hacking.  That’s a pretty terrible commitment to the discipline of writing and contemplation.  I can blame that on so many things: raising small, needy humans; steadily growing home-improvement lists; active social calendars; too many screens and not enough books.  But the truth is, writing is hard.  And everything else can be easy or more immediately fulfilling.

But here I am again, ready to get back into the work of expressing myself… and getting more organized.  The upshot of the rather long hiatus in this series of articles on productivity management is that I have this nice big data-set from which to draw my conclusions.  Which is rather rare for me.  Typically, when I find some “new solution” to an old problem, I’m too quick to conclude that the new is better.

Well, this time I can pretty highly recommend my new take on the old way.  And what is this new way?

Inbox by Gmail

Once again, I’m hardly cutting edge on this bit of software.  It’s been around for a while now.  It rather obviously back-engineered some of the coolest features of the competitor email app known as Mailbox 1.  Inbox is a novel take on its existing email platform, Gmail.  It re-imagines your email as possible “todos”, allowing you to set reminders to your email workflow.  Each email can have an associated task date.  If you add a reminder to an email, these will show up over on your Google Calendar as well, or in Google Now as a card (for mobile users).  So there’s very good cross-product integration.

Setting reminders on an email.
Setting reminders on an email.

Marking an email “done” in Inbox translates to applying the Archive tag over in Gmail.  The genius of Google’s approach here is that you don’t have to sacrifice your Gmail experience and commitment to use Inbox.  You can fluidly go back and forth if you want to.  Although what I found in the past 12 months is that by month 2 or so, I was fully using Inbox exclusively.

And of course, Google has baked in very good keyboard shortcuts so that your workflow can be as fast as you want it to be.  On mobile devices, each email or Reminder 2 can be swiped right for completion and left for rescheduling.  It’s a powerful and fast workflow.  And when you’ve conquered your tasks/emails — which is to say, addressed all the stuff that’s in your inbox — Inbox presents you with the most pleasing trophy you could want: virtual sunshine.

Happy inbox
Happy inbox

Conclusion

Obviously, having all these features integrated tightly into Inbox (and Calendar, and Keep, and Drive, etc.) makes for a great overall user experience.  Gone are the days of buying 3rd party plugins to a Mac OS-only mail client just to set a reminder on an email.  I couldn’t really be much happier 3 with this solution, since it’s all right there at my various fingertips (whether on desktop or mobile).  And the fact that such powerful software is essentially (troublingly?) free makes it all the more compelling.

Looking back, I’m amazed that I ever did email differently.  I had a set of pretty good solutions, cobbled together with 3rd party tools and utilities.  It all got infinitely better when switching to Gmail.  But now with Inbox, I’m in organization nirvana.

Footnotes

  1. Remember how cool Mailbox was?  And then later Dropbox bought it… and slowly and pathetically killed it.
  2. Reminders are just explicit tasks, not email messages, which will show up both on Calendar and Google Now.
  3. …aside from having a few more missing features added.

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