ActiveInbox's blog covers email productivity, GTD in Gmail, focus, and running the startup behind its Gmail task management extension.
HN commenters recommend the ActiveInbox product itself, praising its 'waiting on' and action features for organizing Gmail and its $25/year pro price.
This space of "handle tasks in email" is starting to explode since pg called it as a giant opportunity. Indeed, I believe Mail Pilot are launching their public beta soon - the timing makes me think these guys were (savvily, tbf) trying to jump in alongside it.
It's not just another "todo list", it's really dealing with the pain of remembering the promises you make in email, and the fact email is used to discuss all the work we do, but is completely disconnected from our other management tools.
It's also obviously a positive thing that lots of innovative new products are getting involved: a single pioneer does not a movement make.
Disclaimer:
I've been working on ActiveInbox for Gmail[1], first as a hobby project and later as a bootstrapped business, since 2006. In fact I think we were the earliest, certainly for Gmail.
Oddly enough the transition from hobby to business came about in a very Kickstarter way, but long before it existed -- early users simply wanted to give money to keep us going, we refused at first because it was a "hassle to deal with tax" (this is also long before Lean Startup: customer validation was clearly not something we were tuned too), and eventually set up a PayPal donate button.
And I'm really proud of our community - we've been discussing ways to improve email very openly since we started. They drive ideas, and we implement them to create a very experimental product.
I'd really like to write up our experience for HN, including the experience…
I agree - I've spent a lifetime trying to find the best to do solution (Microwriter Agenda, Psion 3, Palm, GTD, One Big Text File, David Seah's productivity tools, Superfocus, etc. etc.).
Paper in the form of a hardbacked A4 notepad with context specific todo lists and a 2-week calendar seem to work well (inspired by GTD (for contexts), David Seah (for his obsession with functional paper) [1])
I'm also reliant on ZIM Desktop wiki [2] for the 'trusted system' for weekly review - of course, ZIM has a weird bug somewhere in the To Do list functionality that I've had to code around - so it's (not devastatingly) not as trustworthy... but that's life I guess
Just trying out ActiveInbox [3] for managing Gmail better and seems to be working out nicely
[1] http://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/
[2] http://zim-wiki.org/
[3] http://www.activeinboxhq.com/index.php
Looks interesting, there's definitely stuff that can be done to make email better. It'll be interesting to see how this works out.
If you're interested in this and you're a GMail user you might also be interested in Active Inbox[1] which adds some useful features on top of Gmail. It lets you mark emails GTD style as "Action" (requires an action), "Waiting" (waiting on someone else) or "SomeDay" (there's an action to take, but you might not do it now). It also has an easy way to sort emails by project and some other useful features.
Disclaimer: I met Andy of Active Inbox recently and ended up doing a few days work on the product. But I was a happy (and paying) user of Active Inbox before that!
[1]: https://www.activeinboxhq.com/
I use a combination of ActiveInbox (http://www.activeinboxhq.com/) and the Multiple Inbox labs in GMail. I have 5 "multiple inbox" inboxes. I mark emails with a GTD style label that ActiveInbox creates (S/Action, S/Waiting On mostly) and have an inbox that only shows those. Those are my main tasks.
I also have an inbox for starred emails, which are longer term project or information rich emails I want handy. My "top" inbox is unread inbox emails and round it out with drafts and the standard email inbox at the bottom of the page.
It's a really minor thing but on this page:
http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.html
In Chrome the dialog box on the page says:
"This extension can access: Your data on gmail.com, google.com and 3 other websites". But when it popped up in my chrome it said "4 other websites".
It's not a big deal, but it briefly weirded me out when I don't know what those sites are, and when it's different to what I was expecting.
Will let you know what I think of the actual app once I have had a play.
In fact I have paid for a Chrome extension. I've been using http://www.activeinboxhq.com/ Active Inbox since it was in beta on Firefox and it has been instrumental in getting my mail from thousands of unread or processed emails to regularly hitting a Zero Inbox.
I pay mainly to keep development going rather than paying X to buy Y. I think of it more like donating to NPR knowing that I am more likely to receive value in the future by paying now.