Will Henderson

So I’m a big fan of using Mailtags to organize, tag, and archive my email, as well as to make events and todo’s out of my emails easily. I used to think that Mail.app would eventually be my central place for collecting, processing and executing a GTD workflow. However, I’ve been using a number of other GTD-sepcific apps (ie actiontastic, iGTD, etc., etc.) lately, and there are a number of reasons I now think that Mail.app is no substitute for them:

1. It doesn’t have the features of a GTD workflow app- ie a processing mode, the ability to view things by project or context, etc.
2. It shouldn’t have the features of a GTD app. Using Mail.app as a GTD processor forces you to either have multiple such apps (and nothing is worse than trying to manage your projects and actions across multiple apps!) or to try to shoe-horn all your other stuff into Mail.app (ie using NoteToSelf). Neither of these is ideal.
3. It has too many other features. One of the really beautiful things about a program like actiontastic is its utter simplicity. It allows you to focus on collecting you actions, organizing them, and finding the next one to do. Then it gets out of the way when you actually go and do things. Mail.app has other features that get in the way when you are processing your actions, and if you use it for GTD then you may find your GTD system getting in the way when you are trying to actually get things done. A case in point is the fact that Mail.app is an email client, as so as long as it is open, it is a potential source for distraction. I don’t want to have to have it open when I am trying to focus on getting a project done – it’d rather have another app sitting quietly in the background, bringing it up for the sole purpose of finding the next action, and opening Mail.app a couple times a day to fetch mail and burn through my inbox.

So what do I propose instead?
Certainly Mail.app is a valid inbox – that’s undeniable. Using Mailtags, its even possible to process things in Mail.app by tagging them and making them into todo’s, although I will bring up an alternative below. So here is an idea of a workflow:
Open Mail.app with the intention of fetching your email and processing your inbox to empty. If the email you are processing is an event, send it to iCal using Mailtags, and if its a task send it to your task inbox by making it into todos. Then tag the message and archive it. Done.
Actiontastic and any of the other utilities will automatically pick them up when they sync with iCal. Here you have a choice: when you are making a todo in Mail.app, you could give you email a project by tagging it with one, and a context by associating it with a calendar, or you can just associate it with @inbox and process it later when you process your inbox in actiontastic. Personally I opt for the later, since I’d rather be making the simple decision: “is it actionable?” than the more complex one of where to do it, what project it goes under, etc. I worry about those things when I’m in my dedicated GTD app. On the other hand you might want to be able to search by project in Mail.app, so that a good reason to do it there (I can’t think of any reason to search by context in Mail.app though).
I’m not knocking Mail.app. Its a great program, great as an inbox (I mean, that’s one of its core functions) and fantastic for archiving (esp with Mailtags/Mail-act-on). You can always search via Spotlight and this is sweet – all your different archiving apps – Yojombo, Eaglefiler, various documents scattered on your hard drive, old events in iCal (note that I don’t think any of these are worth trying to shoehorn into a GTD system either – use them for what they are good at!) are all searchable in one place. That’s great. One of the point of getting your GTD workflow out of Mail.app is so that it can all in one place too.