It’s been a little over a week since I began the GTD Gmail Experiment.
I quickly discovered that I have great difficulty adjusting to the no folders email environment of Gmail. As my email was forwarded there, I experienced an overload of psychic baggage. I soon took off the forwarding from my other email account. I reasoned that I could forward email that is a task to the Gmail account, which excels at managing tasks.
I like to have one application that takes care of all my needs-it’s all about one stop shopping for me. In theory I could add calendar items to Yahoo, then sync to PDA, then export to the Gmail calendar. In actuality that’s too many steps and I don’t do it.
Despite it’s attractions, I won’t be able to fully use Gmail until these problems are resolved:
- The option of folders for us folks who can’t adjust to life without them.
- Calendar must be able to sync to PDA.
- Add notepad.
- Spam should auto-delete.
Another Update: The Download Squad has a great post about managing Gmail with Five Simple Rules for Keeping an Empty InBox.
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I completely agree that the Calendar should sync to PDA easily. There are options, but they are all very complicated. It should be a couple clicks or even automated.
I’m wondering about the folder issue, though. Are labels not enough? Just curious about your email processing and work flow.
I do agree with you regarding the syncing of the calendar to a PDA. In my opinion, they should create a SyncML server where one can directly sync contacts, calendar, contacts etc from the PDA/Smartphone.
You can use labels as standard folders if you want. Just don’t apply more than one label to a message and you are there.
Spam should not auto-delete, since once in a while a real message will be marked as spam and then it will be lost forever. One should always quickly look though the spam queue before deleting it, and with gmail and its message preview thing it’s often a breeze.
I really hope to spend some more time with Gmail and try the idea of using labels as folders. To further complicate my life, Yahoo mail has sent a link to a new version I haven’t yet explored. I wonder how it will try to compete? I used to check through the Bulk folder in case there was something important among the spam, but I never found anything there.