This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what I want. I consider myself a reasonably high-volume email recipient (>400 actionable emails a day on average).
The problem with "email as todo", which is a habit I had to work very hard to train myself out of, is that it turns your inbox into a to-do list that others can put things on.
This becomes the WORST to-do list ever.
With credit to Amy Hoy (Freckle, 30x500, etc): I believe that the problem is that every email that comes into your inbox is painful because it is associated with an unknown amount of work, and you don't know the amount of work until you open and read it.
Amy's newest product, Charm, is a help desk tool built to solve THAT problem - fundamentally decoupling the processing of email from the work that those emails contain.
My workflow right now includes:
1) first line of defense assistant does triage, cleaning out things that I don't ever need to see and either need deleting, or don't need my input. This includes anything from FAQ to scheduling meetings, etc.
2) second line of defense is answering emails that only need an answer - usually nothing more than a sentence or two.
3) everything else that's left in my inbox requires work. turning emails that do need my attention into todo's means that I can work from a to-do list, or ideally the current day's to-do list with items prioritized onto it with the help of an assistant.
I'm pretty sure that @sivers has a similar workflow that I've read about here on HN, he may be able to comment more.
This makes email 10000000x less painful, and makes my to-do list less like playing whack-a-mole. End of story: it's easier to get more work done. Email is working for me instead of against me. That is email nirvana, or as close as I'm willing to accept today :)
Of course - the problem with this workflow is that it requires another human. I don't know if that's avoidable. Truthfully, the people who I've hired who work with my inbox I trust deeply. My inbox is a strange dichotomy of a place that is private, but that anybody can send something into. He needs a lot of context for making smart calls, and for me, I need to trust him to make those calls.
Email clients need work - a lot of work - but this is more than renaming the statuses of an email and showing me who I've emailed most recently with.
Take the work out of email, and put it where it belongs.
a to-do list that others can put things on. This becomes the WORST to-do list ever.
If you still do the work that emails contain, you still have a todo list other people can put things on, don't you?
So what's the real problem with inbox-as-todo-list? That new work goes at the top? That work and non-work are mixed? That one TODO item can be in several revisions over many visually separated emails? That you can't track partially done things?
> If you still do the work that emails contain, you still have a todo list other people can put things on, don't you?
Sometimes, but not always. As your inbox volume increases, the % of things that come in that you don't want to become work for you also increases.
Note: I don't consider myself "famous". That said, I've gotten some good mainstream press related to my projects and I've also gone out of my way to make myself available to people by sharing my time, experiences, and lessons learned. This has paid off MASSIVELY and I wouldn't change that. What it's lead to, though, is the impact of a lot of people who don't think about the work they're creating for someone before they hit send. They're not forming complete thoughts, really asking for what they want/need, and in some cases, even asking anything at all.
I wouldn't give up the 20% of high quality email I get for the 80% of difficult to process email I get, but the 80% is still there.
That means that a pretty significant % of the non-spam emails I get are emails that need more work done to them before they're complete enough for me to do anything with them.
If I think of my inbox and assistant as a worker queue, it's their job is to keep incoming messages from being lost and disorganized, and in many cases, preparing the information/requests in the email for being worked on by me.
Maybe the issue is that the person adding things to my to-do list knows my workload, my priorities. The person emailing me doesn't have that context, and rarely has the consideration of it in the first place.
There is not a one-to-one correspondence between items in my inbox and items on my todo list, and items in inbox don't necessarily say what I need to do.
e.g. an e-mail in my inbox asking me to clean the frobulator might translate to one of the following todo lists:
a) 1. clean the frobulator
b) 1. buy frobulator cleaning fluid 2. empty the frobulator 3. clean the frobulator 4. refill the frobulator 5. reply to sender informing them that the frobulator is now clean
c) 1. reply to sender telling them why I can't/won't clean the frobulator
d) (no action necessary)
But my inbox won't help me remember which of these is the case. And that's ok, because that's not what it's for. That's what my todo list is for.
But this application proposal - and many peoples' workflows for everything from day-to-day email to customer support treat their inboxes as to-do lists. It's a bad habit, one I had myself and had to work HARD to break. An email interface that trains people out of that habit, or keeps people from forming it, would improve productivity for a lot of people without them even realizing it.
This is well-articulated, but as you say yourself ("high-volume recipient"), you're probably an outlier. The problems and solutions that the kickstarter project talks about really resonated with me (I probably only receive about 50 emails per day).
I could use a little clarification on your exact point though -- sounds like you're saying that your email application isn't your todo list, but your emails become your todo list (just in some other silo than your inbox)? Seems like the same thing to me -- what if the email application was more like that other silo, then you don't need 2 silos.
Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, it's probably fair to mention that you have been Amy Hoy's business partner in the past (not that this implies any dishonesty or discreditation of your point... just sayin').
I might be an outlier - but I know that these bad habits formed BEFORE I was an outlier.
As I mention in another comment, the important part is the transition from inbox to to-do list having a level of intelligence to it that considers context, the relationship with the person, current workload and priorities, etc. Right now a human does that. I'd pay for a product that did it, if it didn't feel to the sender like a robot was working for me.
I've collaborated with Amy, yes, but we're not nor have we ever been business partners. Good friends and co-conspirators for sure, like many of you on here. Her husband Thomas is her only business partner.
This is a good point, anything that they create should make life easier for people who have a wide range of email volumes. That is easy to forget when designing an application because the fastest user persona to consult for design decisions is yourself.
This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what I want. I consider myself a reasonably high-volume email recipient (>400 actionable emails a day on average).
The problem with "email as todo", which is a habit I had to work very hard to train myself out of, is that it turns your inbox into a to-do list that others can put things on.
This becomes the WORST to-do list ever.
With credit to Amy Hoy (Freckle, 30x500, etc): I believe that the problem is that every email that comes into your inbox is painful because it is associated with an unknown amount of work, and you don't know the amount of work until you open and read it.
Amy's newest product, Charm, is a help desk tool built to solve THAT problem - fundamentally decoupling the processing of email from the work that those emails contain.
My workflow right now includes:
1) first line of defense assistant does triage, cleaning out things that I don't ever need to see and either need deleting, or don't need my input. This includes anything from FAQ to scheduling meetings, etc. 2) second line of defense is answering emails that only need an answer - usually nothing more than a sentence or two. 3) everything else that's left in my inbox requires work. turning emails that do need my attention into todo's means that I can work from a to-do list, or ideally the current day's to-do list with items prioritized onto it with the help of an assistant.
I'm pretty sure that @sivers has a similar workflow that I've read about here on HN, he may be able to comment more.
This makes email 10000000x less painful, and makes my to-do list less like playing whack-a-mole. End of story: it's easier to get more work done. Email is working for me instead of against me. That is email nirvana, or as close as I'm willing to accept today :)
Of course - the problem with this workflow is that it requires another human. I don't know if that's avoidable. Truthfully, the people who I've hired who work with my inbox I trust deeply. My inbox is a strange dichotomy of a place that is private, but that anybody can send something into. He needs a lot of context for making smart calls, and for me, I need to trust him to make those calls.
Email clients need work - a lot of work - but this is more than renaming the statuses of an email and showing me who I've emailed most recently with.
Take the work out of email, and put it where it belongs.