Getting Things Done in Gmail

David Allen's Getting Things Done (wikipedia and David Allen's website) introduced me to a very useful method of managing Todo items. Every new "Todo" is immediately classified into one of three categories: Action, Waiting, or Resource. When dealing with email, this means immediately moving every new email out of your inbox into one of the three categories, thus keeping your inbox completely empty. I've found this is the simplest and easiest method for managing action items.

In Microsoft Outlook, I created 3 folders, "Action", "Waiting" and "Resource". In Gmail, I find the best method is a combination of the "Superstars" and "Multiple Inboxes" add-ons from google labs. Both are enabled under "Settings->Labs".



Note: Globex's Google Redesigned add-on for Firefox is enabled.

After enabling Superstars, I reduced the number of stars (under Settings->General) to "yellow-star" for Action and "purple-question" for Waiting. Anything considered Resource has no star.

After enabling Multiple Inboxes, I configured 2 extra inboxes (under Settings->Multiple Inboxes). The first has the search query "has:yellow-star" and the title "Action", and the second has the query "has:purple-question" and the title "Waiting".

When reading an email, I simply click the star to cycle through "Action" or "Waiting" (no star means "Resource"), then I archive every email to remove them from my inbox. The starred emails will automatically appear in their respective inboxes, and the rest are archived as "Resource"! Voila! GTD in Gmail!