After reading David Allen's Getting things done: the art of stress-free productivity (Absolute gold! I should have read it years ago!), i realised that email is a fundamental problem for me, and that i need to seriously revamp the way i use it. After thinking a while on this and looking at a few different tools online, it seems that there are no email applications which work the way i want to work. The dedicated GTD applications do a good job, but you have to manually enter the data in most cases, and email is where i get most of my "stuff". I want an email application that does everything i need without going to an external application for todos/tasks/calendar/etc. I started dreaming about my ideal email client, and these are some of the ideas i came up with...
Features
- Combines multiple email identities, servers, and folders to give a unified view of email (but still offers fine-grained control if needed).
- Able to integrate data from RSS feeds and other sources also.
- Constant indexing of all email to provide instant searching of messages.
- View of all messages would be threaded by subject/thread id like Gmail.
- Simple setup to use the GTD categories for processing: trash, someday/maybe (tickler file; hold for review), reference, project (planning or action), delegate (to someone else), calendar (do at a specific time), next action (do as soon as possible). Once one of these is chosen, a new email disappears from the unread list and appears in the appropriate list.
- Integrated calendar which allows multiple date-based events to be linked to one or more email messages.
- Customisable categories that can be used to sort or filter; e.g. MonkeyGTD has realm (work or personal), context (office, email, errand, weekend, etc.), project, and contact
- Bayesian classification which suggests a likely classification for new messages based on your previous actions.
- Default layout shows the next week's calendar in summary, today's calendar in detail, a list of ongoing projects, and a short summary of the unread email, but this should be completely customisable, including which views are show, their size, and their contents.
- Automatic time tracking which can show you a retrospective view on how much time you actually spent with the application active, broken down into different contacts, projects, contexts, etc.
- Predefined views for the different "altitudes" at which work needs to be reviewed.
- Allow setting of expiry times on emails after which they are archived automatically to reference.
- Publish calendar (public or private) so that i can subscribe to it from my PDA/Phone/other computer.
Issues
- I'm still not sure how to deal with newsgroups & mailing lists in the GTD approach - they seem to defy useful classification. Maybe i'll just unsubscribe from them all.
- Would IRC or XMPP instant messaging fit into this as well?
- How could you scale this to multi-user? If that were done, it would eliminate my need for Request Tracker. Maybe this: allow people who are in my contacts list to login through the same interface and see/create messages which were sent to or from them.
- Offline use?
If anyone knows an application that can do this, i'd be happy to pay money for it, despite being a Free Software bigot.
