Using first line of email to Nirvana as title of task
I have a suggestion that would be a great productivity feature for me and probably for a lot of other Nirvana users as well : I would like Nirvana to use the first line of any email I sent to my special Nirvana address (***@nirvanahq.com) as the title of the task, instead of using the subject of the email for such purpose.
Maybe a little description of my workflow will best highlight the benefit of such a feature.
Workflow before Nirvana:
- I read my emails first thing in the morning.
- If I can do it in less than 2 minutes, I answer or deal with the matter of the email and archive it.
- If it is not actionnable (reference material), I file it (Outlook until 2010) or archive it (Gmail only now).
- If I have something to do about it, I would either file it in a "To do - context" category or plain simply leave it in my Inbox as a reminder (telling myself I would surely clear it before the end of the day).
Well, you can guess what happened : I had lots of buckets where "Todos" where hidden and an Inbox that would never really clear. And it would take me more than an hour every day to process my Inbox.
Workflow since Nirvana:
First 3 steps above are the same. However, if I have something
to do in relation with the email:
1. I hit F (in Gmail, iti sthe shortcut for Forward to...)
2. I type À (in French, it is the first letter of Todo, or
À faire, which is the contact I created with my Nirvana
adress)
3. I type Tab-tab-tab and the Title of my task (e.g. "Reply to
So-and-so with required info")
4. I click "Send and Archive"
And I process my email Inbox to zero! Every morning! And I got rid of all my Todo buckets in my email client (where they never belongued in the first place). And I do it in less than 15 minutes! And I didn't even have to "discipline" myself, it is so natural and painless! Thanks Nirvana. Thank you, thank you, thank you...
Of course, after that, I go to my Nirvana Inbox and I still have to process all the items. But they all are real next actions already identified, just asking for some organization.
Now, for my suggestion:
I use the first line of the forwarded email to specify the action to do because I don't want to change the subject of the email I forward to Nirvana. Gmail users know that Gmail groups emails in "conversations" or "threads" according to their title. Changing the title would break the thread, whereas keeping the title allow me to spot very easily if a conversation as a follow-up in Nirvana (if it was forwarded to Nirvana).
The downside is that the task in Nirvana's Inbox has the email subject as its title. When I open the task to assign tags, time, effort, etc..., I also have to copy the first line of the note (which contains the full forwarded email as reference) into the title. Since I do that tens of time each day, I would really appreciate that Nirvana would be able to parse the first line of the email.
Simple suggestion, long explanation. I hope you like it and it might be useful to other users.
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2 Posted by Lasares on 26 Jul, 2010 05:31 PM
Parsing the email to find the task could also be the beginning of a solution for those who want to sent multiple tasks to Nirvana in a single email.
3 Posted by Glenn on 28 Jul, 2010 08:56 PM
+1 after reading this.
I'm also using Gmail and get the logic behind this request. That's actually a great idea!
4 Posted by Ari on 28 Jul, 2010 11:30 PM
+1 Also using gmail - but would propose tags to be parsed in the same way as quick-add text box, i.e. with a # prefix.
5 Posted by Siraj on 20 Oct, 2010 11:48 AM
I see the point.
David McLaughlin closed this discussion on 10 Feb, 2011 03:48 PM.