About a year ago I posted about a way to manage your todo list with GMail.
The concept is simple: label your emails as TODO and search through them. Next actions are just starred TODOs. Labelling and filtering your email with GMail is a snap, but in order to have cool “todo” and “next action” links available through the interface I had to use greasemonkey and saved searches.
Nowadays, with google updating GMail and me switching to osx/safari, that solution doesn’t work anymore. Luckily enough I noticed that GMail searches are now bookmarkable… so here I recap the steps for setting up your minimal todo list:
- create a new contact named todo whose email is your_account_name+todo@gmail.com (eg: paolo.dona+todo@gmail.com)
- create a label named todo
- create a filter matching to:(your_account_name+todo@gmail.com) and flag: Skip Inbox, Apply label “todo”.
- now search your mail for label:todo and bookmark the page as [todo]
- search your mail for label:todo is:starred and bookmark the page as [next action]
you should get something like (todo):
and (next action):
Have you noticed the [todo] and [next action] bookmarks I put in my Bookmarks Bar? I know this is not a solution that suits everyone’s needs, but it brings a couple of pros:
- I can add filters that automatically populate my todo list from incoming emails.
- I can play with labels and easily let todo items belong to projects, locations etc (GTD style).
- I do not have to implement my own todo list manager as most rails programmers do :)
Happy GTDing!