Inboxed

I got to say this…

For productivity reasons I have just switched to Inbox by Google and, hence, away from Gmail.

This move requires the abandonment of ‘tasks’ and the adoption of ‘reminders’. Which is a good thing in many ways.

It is also the first step away from an email-centric work practice. Just the other day I was being lectured on the power of ‘zero email’ only to discover that email is well on it’s way to being just another way to receive messages.

In essence, once they are done (and in Google’s weird way, they will do it over some time), there will be a message/action-reminder centre with a coarse sense of time (days) which is the Inbox, a calendar showing actions-reminders with a highly resolved time frame, and eventually they will also need a ‘Project’ view (it will develop out of Keep) which allows the user to aggregate actions as part of larger projects, again with a coarse sense of time.

Messages will all be treated the same, no matter where they come from – email, SMS, any messenger app, or carrier pigeons.

Reminders-actions are created directly from a message or as added to either the Calendar or yet-to-be-created Project view; these reminders will show in all three views.

Back to the present; just figuring out how to get the Chrome version of Google Calendar to display ‘reminders’ took me half an hour of research, trawling through forums.

And fuck me, wasn’t the switcheroo button buried in the least obvious place known to mankind….

Those software engineering millennials, I wouldn’t let them anywhere near a UI.