GTDInbox for Gmail - Easy email management, organization and workflow based on GTD

FAQ

Is GTDInbox for you?

• Is this aimed at individuals?

  Yes. Kind of.

  It works just within your email account, and helps you manage the flow of tasks and information that your emails represent.

  However, email is a highly collaborative environment, and all benefit when everyone in an organization uses GTDInbox on their accounts.

• What kind of task manager is GTDInbox?

  The aim is to fill a gap in your personal organization. This is because the tasks that arrive in email are not particularly well suited to a traditional task manager. They are fast flowing, often very small, and may be re-routed to other people or solved very quickly. Contrast this with a traditional task manager, which is designed for clearly defined tasks that are processed in a more stable manner. Quite simply, it's not economical to move a typical email task to your regular task manager.

  Therefore GTDInbox takes care of the many little inbox tasks, keeping your traditional task manager clean to focus on the bigger picture. (To underline this, in the future we intend to find ways to connect your traditional task manager into Gmail so you can have the best of both worlds).

  Having said all that, it's true that Gmail can actually make a perfectly acceptable full task manager - and lots of people use it for that. Especially for people who live in email. Gmail is widely available, has vast file storage, and is naturally suited to team communication.

• Does this require more effort than regular email?

  No - no one needs yet another complication in their busy lives.

  GTDInbox is designed to be effortless, easy to use and very in tune with Gmail. It also sticks to the simple and well understood concept of email. Rather than expecting you to create and maintain tasks and then attach emails to them, you simply turn emails into tasks.

• What happens if I use a public computer or mobile device where GTDInbox is not installed?

  All your tasks and projects will still be useable as GTDInbox relies only on Gmail's own labels - which are always accessible.

Using GTDInbox

• What is the most effective way of using GTDInbox?

  Please read the Getting Started page.

• I'm only interested in a handful of GTDInbox features, can I disable the rest?

  Yes, all features are configurable.

• Is it okay to use GTDInbox with a single Gmail account across multiple machines?

  It's fine, but your specific GTDInbox Settings will not be synchronised - you have to do this manually for now

Troubleshooting

• The GTDInbox Sidebar tells me it is unable to load

  Check your cookies are permitted for Gmail.

  In Firefox, go to the Options/Preferences (for Firefox, not GTDInbox), and switch to the 'Privacy' tab.

  In Firefox 3.5 and later, ensure that either you have selected 'Remember History', or if you want to be more selective, use 'Use Custom Settings for History', and ensure both 'Accept Cookies from Sites' and 'Accept third-party cookies' are checked/enabled. If you have them unchecked for security reasons, please enable them just for Gmail, by clicking 'Exceptions', entering 'mail.google.com' into the 'Address of web site' textbox, and clicking 'Allow'.
  It could look something like this:
  

  Alternatively, if you use Firefox 3.1 or earlier, ensure that both "Accept cookies from sites" and "Accept third-party cookies" are checked (enabled). If you have them unchecked for security reasons, please enable them for Gmail, by clicking 'Exceptions', entering 'mail.google.com' into the 'Address of web site' textbox, and clicking 'Enable'.
  It should look something like this:
  

  If that fails, please drop an email to support@gtdinbox.com.

• The GTDInbox Sidebar is telling me that it could not properly read the Conversation data

  Please contact Andy (support@gtdinbox.com) and we'll diagnose it with you.

• When I click the "Setup" button on the GTDInbox Sidebar nothing happens

  This mostly affects Linux users. Please just install the Status labels (e.g. S/Action, S/Waiting On, S/Some Day and S/Finished) manually by going to Gmail's Settings, selecting the Labels tab, and adding them.

• Why do lots of features disappear in Gmail's offline mode?

  We simply haven't fully cracked offline mode yet, and so lots of features only "kind of" work - and we didn't think that would be much fun for anyone :) We're working on full offline support, but it might take a while. Please note that it only stops working when in 'Unstable Mode', you can have Offline mode activated, but do not use Unstable Mode.

• GTDInbox has stopped working, what do I do?

  You can either report a bug on the UserVoice, or email us support@gtdinbox.com

  In most cases, it will help immensely to know if you are experiencing any actual errors. You can use standard Firefox tools to find out:

  1. Close Gmail tabs
  2. Open Firefox's Error Console (in the Tools menu)
  3. In the Error Console, move to the 'Messages' tab/button
  4. Click Clear to clear the Messages list
  5. Go back to the Firefox window, and open Gmail (and log in)
  6. Switch back to the Messages list in Error Console. You should start seeing debugging information from GTDInbox.

  In normal circumstances, there will be a lot of messages (if there's none, then it might not even be loading at all - very unusual). Fortunately, there is only one type of thing you need to look for (and if it's crashing, there will be much less debugging output as it will stop after the error).

  An error will be on multiple lines (and one of the only messages that is), and it will have line numbers and stack trace information. This should make it easy to spot in a quick scan.

  An example is:

  Error in glNavBar: Could not find mainBucketsContainer nodeStack trace:Exception thrown("Could not find mainBucketsContainer node","glNavBar")@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/util/debug.js:110([object Object])@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/gmail/ui/glNavBar.js:73

  If you see anything like this, please include it in your message on the forum, or your email.

Configuring

• How do I remove GTDInbox?

  In Firefox, go to Tools, then Addons - a window will pop up - now select GTDInbox and click Uninstall.

  To complete it, you may wish to clean up Gmail by removing GTDInbox specific labels (e.g. S/Action).

Misc

• Can I use GTDInbox via IMAP?

  Yes, we use IMAP-friendly prefixes on the labels, so they'll show up as folders in your IMAP software (e.g. P/GTDInbox would be a GTDInbox subfolder within the P folder).

• Can I use GTDInbox on a mobile device?

  Sort of. You can't use GTDInbox per se, but you can use Gmail on many mobile devices, and still process emails efficiently using your action labels.