1) Overview
GTDInbox is a personal assistant for Gmail to control email overload.
At its most simple, GTDInbox has 3 key functions:
- file your emails into manageable tasks and resources
- quickly retrieve important emails, tasks, files and contacts
- speed up your daily use of Gmail
Hopefully you will find GTDInbox very easy to use, after you have set up your labels (see below). However, if you get stuck check out the Help (see the sidebar), or drop Andy an email (andy@gtdinbox.com)!
And as a little teaser, there are plenty more innovative plugins for GTDInbox coming in 2009 with the aim of bringing emails and other communication under more control.
2) Setup Labels
GTDInbox revolves around Gmail's labels.
There are 4 inbuilt types: Statuses, Projects, Contexts and References.
You create them by prefixing the labels you create (e.g. normally you'd create a project for 'House Keeping' by prefixing with 'P/', i.e. 'P/House Keeping').
GTDInbox also enables a folder-like view of your labels, using forward-slashes in label names.
So, 'P/GTDInbox/New Features' and 'P/GTDInbox/Customer Support' would create the following structure:
GTDInbox
New Features
Customer Support
GTDInbox has a set of special Status (aka Task) labels that is expects to find: S/Next Action, S/Action, S/Waiting On, S/Some Day and S/Finished.
GTDInbox can automatically add those labels for you, or you can manually add them via the Gmail Setting's Labels screen.
GTDInbox has added more detailed information about setting up Labels in Gmail Setting's Labels screen.