As it’s Monday, I thought I’d give us the feeling the week is off to a strong start (and not dwell on the fact that actually this was finished last week, but I forgot to mention it…)
Looking back at Sub Tasks
Sub Tasks are one of my fave features in ActiveInbox. No doubt you’ve noticed, the #1 issue with your email is it’s someone else’s madness… their subject lines, their wordy emails, their distant acquaintance with the concepts of grammar.
Sub Tasks let you boil away the cacophony of noise in every email, leaving a handful of crystal clear tasks to do.
This proves to be especially helpful if, like me, you have that most unproductive of habits: curiosity. Even if I know I can’t respond to an email, I still read them as they come in. Then forget. Then hurl myself back in to read it again later. It’s just too gratifying a habit, and I can’t stop, but there is a hack to at least make it worthwhile: on that first read, write your sub tasks out. Then when you come back, you know exactly what to do.
The missing step
As I briefly touched on in my last post, I have an allergic reaction to embedding too tightly into Gmail. 14 years. 5,100 days. 306,000 minutes of wondering if now is the moment Gmail will change again, and I’ll have to adapt ActiveInbox around it.
Well, this time at least, I have to admit the juice is worth the squeeze and suck up the pain. Because so far in beta testing, I’ve found Sub Tasks to be much much more useful if they also appear in the regular Gmail inbox and search results, next to their email.
It makes it scannable in one place, which is wonderful for prioritising what things to dive into first.
Enabling, Disabling
It’s rolling out in 7.5.12, which should be with you today.
I listened to you after the last big change I made, and this time remembered to make it a preference 😀
If you open ActiveInbox Preferences, you can turn it off again by unchecking “Show Sub Tasks inline in Gmail Inbox and Search Results”.
This was written by Andy Mitchell