Gmail Plural “Inboxes” Are A Real Pane

I am not a hyperorganized person. I am more of a ‘scruffy’, as defined by Abramson and Friedman in “A Perfect Mess” (a wonderful book about the impulse to organize ourselves).

However, I live and work in the real world, and I need to accomplish things, and to do so I need to keep track of what I need to do.

Although I dream of a world without email, it is a cental part of the communication flow that defines my life. And that flow rolls right through Gmail, so I am skittish about doing anything to change that setup.

For example, as a side effect of the new Offline capability for Gmail, the Remember The Milk Firefox plugin for Gmail isn’t working as it is supposed to, so my workflow is temporarily screwed up. (Note: this has happened a number of times before, and the RTM folks seem to be able to fix their stuff within a few days. They are constantly trailing the Gmail upgrades a bit.)

At any rate, I have a fairly minimal use of filters and labels in Gmail. I don’t want to spend a lot of time filing things, so I generally rely on Remember the Milk to hold onto the emails that are related to tasks I need to accomplish in the next few weeks, and everything else I simply deal with, delete, or archive, relying on my memory or Gmail’s search to fill in the gaps.

So when I read about Gmail’s so-called ‘multiple inboxes’ my immediate reaction was, no way! First of all, as has been observed by Jason Kincaid and Zoli Erdos that it’s really a multipane view, not multiple inboxes.

Gmail multiple panes or “inboxes”, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Second, looking at the screenshot above I was struck at the busyness of the screen. I could get lost in this very easily.

My goal with actions like email is to figure out ways to have less information on the screen, not more. Perhaps because I use multiple screens at once, I often have multiple Gmail windows open — one editing an email, a second searching for something, a third showing my inbox — but those are different screens, each designed to do one particular activity.

So I am not going to adopt this new UI even if it could coexist with Remember the Milk which currently occupies the rightmost 20% of my Gmail inbox screen:

Remember The Milk Gmail Integration

I just don’t want to have my workflow derailed, and messing with the inbox is just too close to the bone.

What RTM gives me is a way to array emails that need to be responded to or followed up on in a time ordered way, but not the time of arrival which is how inboxes work. It’s ordered by time, but based on when I determine it needs to be handled. So I move emails from the inbox very quickly, archiving them, but assigning dates in the RTM plugin. So my inbox only holds the email that I haven’t read yet, or that I am going to handle in the next few hours. All pending mail is archived, and date ordered in RTM. Then I subsequently pull up emails (and other tasks) that need to be done on the day they need to be handled.

Something like this ‘multiple inboxes’ may help people who use their email inbox in a very different way that I do, but I don’t see how it would help me at all.

[Note: Google brought out their own task manager integrated with Gmail, but it is inferior to the RTM implementation (see Going Back To Remember The Milk, Goodbye To Gmail Tasks).]