I’ve been following the discussion on Inbox actions, and I wanted to jump in to agree with those calling for the Inbox to be separate from the Proj/Actions list.
I spent some time yesterday dumping everything from my previous tool, and from all my paper notes, into the Inbox, with the intention of processing them today. But, when I went to the Proj/Actions list to check on some items for today, there are my 100+ items, taking over the top of the list and crowding all my projects and tasks to below the fold.
So – I think a separate Inbox is a critical feature. Or at least, some simple way to filter Inbox items OUT of the Proj/Actions list. (And if there is a simple way and I missed it, I apologize.)
Thanks for the feedback and I’m glad to hear you are liking the app enough to move items over!
A quick solution to not seeing all those inbox items in your Projects and Actions list is to filter out all the “none” area items as described in this post.
James – thanks for the quick reply. One of the reasons I’m giving GTDNext a serious look is the responsiveness of the team, and the apparent velocity of development.
I tried the filter idea, and it may be a good workaround. However, there is more to processing the inbox than just assigning an area. (For example, I see no way to assign an action to a project from within the Inbox list.) I’ve assigned all my brain-dump Inbox items to an area, but they are still really Inbox items till I’ve decided the rest of their fate.
So, I think there is more thinking to be done in this area. In the meantime, I’m here and using the app. Thanks for the good work, and the good support.
Hi Bruce - thanks for giving us a serious look! In a previous life I ran some pretty large departments of product support so I believe in providing good timely support. Thanks for the confirmation that we are on the right track.
Quite true. One of the reasons we originally defaulted to adding all inbox items to the Projects and Actions view is because our inbox feature does not yet have the ability to assign actions to projects. It will eventually, but that is the reason we defaulted to showing inbox items to the outline view. However, it appears some people seem to like it that way, so we will likely end up allowing people to control the behavior with a setting.
Just to be clear - I do not want to see you being misled. I am one of those who have defended the present implementation. This is because I am perfectly fine with it, and have no problem with seeing my Inbox items in P&A. I use the app’s inbox mainly as a “GTD internal transfer mechanism” from my email inbox to my actions list. I usually deal with them right away. and when I enter new tasks manually I almost always put them straight in the right place (with all the tags, project etc etc) or occasionally on the Focus list where I can see them. I do not collect tons of spurious thoughts in this particular inbox. So I have no preference either way, and there is no need to keep two options just for folks like me.
I do think, regardless of the above, that it would be a good idea to have a complete task entry/edit pane available even for new tasks, and I prefer the default “landing place” for such manually created tasks to be at the top of the list I am looking at right now (which is usually not the inbox).
And, since I have so few emails coming in that I do not have a solid habit of checking the inbox and am afraid I might not notice them early enough, I would like to have a preference setting for having incoming email auto-focused for my attention. Then I would feel much safer - and I could always un-focus the items once I have noticed that they are there, if I want to deal with them later.
