Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m excited and I’m feeling great anticipation to show you an app that you have been asking
me a lot to show you which is Google’s new Inbox.
I finally received my invite and I’ve got Inbox running on my mobile devices and on
my desktop.
It’s there right here.
You can see it right behind me right now.
What do I think of it?
It’s interesting.
Stick around and discover why today on DottoTech.
Today, we are looking at Inbox, which Google has kind of set the stage for by promoting
and telling us that it is the end of email overload.
It’s not the end of email overload.
The only way we’re going to have the end of email overload if people stop sending us
stupid stuff and stuff that we don’t need or we get less busy.
Email overload is still going to happen but Inbox is a new way to approach it.
Now I’ve got to start out by filling you in on really what Inbox is.
Inbox is really a new email client probably designed more for your mobility platform than
for your desktop platform.
You can use it on all of your smartphones, on your tablet, and on your desktop computer
as I have it here.
It doesn’t have to replace Gmail but it can replace Gmail for you.
So this is my account.
Here’s my account on Gmail and here’s my same account in Inbox.
Now what Inbox is going to try to do is it’s going to try and tie and include reminders
and tasks a little bit more in the interface.
They’re trying to give us a little bit more functionality but they’re also trying to
give us a different view.
They’re also trying to give us a different way of looking at our data and our information
and our email as it comes in.
I have had a lot of praise for Gmail in the past because of these here along the top,
these tabs which basically allows Gmail to filter through our email and recognize our
patterns of using our email and then automatically directing email into these different tabs
of Social, Promotions, Updates and my prime email which contains all of the main email
that I’m interested in.
Inbox does the same sort of thing.
It groups emails together, emails that have different common threads running through them
and it doesn’t just do it on those kind of big areas things but it does it on smaller,
on a more granular level, much like nested emails.
If you have nested email where you follow a thread through, much like that but it will
do it now with multiple emails all being put into that one little nest, if that makes sense.
But the big thing I think that they are trying to present is first of all, the cleaner interface
that seems to be a big theme these days of whitening up the interface and making your
screen less cluttered.
Jury is out on how valuable that is but that is one part of it.
The other part of it is adding some additional functionality to the email puzzle.
They do that with a couple of different features that kind of jump out and we notice right
away.
The first is at the very top of the menu bar, you see right here we’ve got something that
shows us a pin.
This allows you to pin or create an urgency or an importance to different either reminders
or messages in your email that you can then filter through just with a flip of a button
here to whatever the most important ones are.
This pinning concept allows you to demark the most important email as it comes in or
the most important things you have to do.
The other thing is down here in the Compose area—sorry, I’ve got this little bouncing
side sync thing.
I’m just going to quit that in a minute because I’m going to be showing you this
on my mobility device in just a few moment—first of all it looks at who you’ve been writing
email to the most recently and it brings them up as options.
But right above it is a new feature.
This is Reminders.
When I click on this, I create a reminder and I can attach a time to that reminder,
which basically makes it kind of like a task that I can assign to myself and I can pin
to the top of my list so it’s always there and I’m always being reminded of it.
For example, right now I have to do something with my house insurance.
I’m going to type in “house insurance” because I have to renew it and I’m going
to put that in and save it.
So now every time I open my email or look at my email, I have my house insurance reminder
pinned to the top.
If I wanted to put in a date and a time on it, I could do that and if it’s something
that I’ve finished, I can mark it as done.
So it does create a bit of a to-do list mentality to your email and that’ not a bad thing.
So many of our tasks and to-dos come out of our email so this ability to be able to manage
those tasks right within this email interface I think is overall a pretty good idea.
If we take a look at my email interface back in Gmail, I have worked out a system where
I actually have, if I choose any email from anybody here—let’s just choose this email
right here—I’ve got this little integration with Todoist, which is my to-do list manager,
so I can add this to my To-Do list just by clicking here.
The marriage between email and task list manager is one that is not just a marriage of convenience.
There’s a lot there they’re trying to build it into the Inbox interface.
Those are kind of some of the top level things that happen in it.
Personally, this view here isn’t rocking for me.
If we look at what happens in Gmail with the way that our tabs go—let me just go back
into my main inbox—when we look at it, it is certainly a far less sexy interface, the
old one.
It’s definitely more cluttered, more information dense.
Now I can choose different views which will make it a little bit less information dense
but I’ve got a lot going on here.
But here’s the thing that I am having trouble getting past with Inbox.
Inbox is giving me a little bit of graphical indication of what’s coming in and where
it’s coming from.
It shows me who’s sending me the email.
If it’s not a person, if it doesn’t have an avatar for the person, it puts the first
letter of their name to kind of help sort it.
I don’t know how that helps to sort things.
I have long used color coding in my filters to help me sort things.
So what I’m missing when I use Inbox and there might be a way to do this—I just haven’t
found it yet so maybe in the Comments area if you know how to do this, maybe you can
comment and go, “Steve, you just missed it”— when I look in here, I color code
with these labels the most important emails that come in, things from my community, from
Patreon.
I know that if somebody has come in and posted something on Patreon, that’s something that
I would want to respond to right away and so I hone in.
I’ve kind of tuned myself up so that when I open up my email, the first thing that I
look for is the colored badges of important information coming in that I want to deal
with right away.
So if someone in Patreon has sent me a message, they’re part of my community that pays for
the site, I want to respond to that right away.
Similarly, when there’s income coming me, that little yellow badge tells me somebody
bought something from me, when I see the little yellow badge, I do the little yellow badge
happy dance.
Woohoo, I made money.
So that’s one that really makes me happy and I would miss it if I didn’t have my
little yellow badge in my email coming in.
So there’s some real practicality and there’s some kind of me holding onto the past that
I’m looking for with these kinds of labels and the labelling system that seems to be
missing here from Inbox.
Now you can do the same kind of sorting and moving your mail into different mail boxes
here within it by clicking on the side button.
But primarily they try and make you work on a very clean interface that there has very
little distraction attached to the interface.
We’ve seen this in Evernote.
Evernote’s been doing this for a while now where they’ve cleaned up the interface.
They’re getting mixed reviews.
Some people love it.
Some people hate it.
The amount of time you spend on the desktop client is probably going to be dwarfed by
the amount of time we spend on the mobile client.
I really get the feeling that this product is built more for mobility than it is for
desktop and there’s nothing wrong with considering you might want to use Inbox on your smartphone
and still use Gmail on your desktop or use whatever other email client you want to use
on your desktop.
I think that that is going to well within the realm of possibility.
So let’s just jump in and let me show you quickly the app running on my smartphone.
Here I am showing it to you on a Galaxy 5S, the Samsung smartphone.
You can see that there’s real consistency to the interface.
It looks very similar to what I was seeing in the desktop interface.
Now for instance, if I click on my promotion, all of my promotion emails will now come up.
The nice thing is I can deal with them really quickly.
If I click here, I can actually archive them all and get rid of them all with one click
of the mouse.
Very nice from that perspective.
By clicking on the plus button, I can choose to compose a new email or to create a new
reminder.
So again, that interface is very consistent.
I can also do swiping going one way or the other.
Now swiping to the right tells me that I’ve dealt with something, swiping from the left
to the right, that’s where I’m doing that one.
If you go the other way, this is an interesting addition.
This will allow you to snooze an email.
This is something similar that we do with Boomerang or I’ve shown you in the past
with Boomerang.
Some people love this idea and some productivity people hate this idea.
But this is the concept: you don’t want to have a cluttered inbox.
A clean inbox means a clean mind.
So a big way that Google is recommending that we keep our inbox clean is any email that
comes in that we don’t want to deal with right now, we can just pretend it’s gone.
We send it away and we have it come back to us at some point in the future.
Now I don’t hate this concept.
I use it a lot for Boomerang.
But a good friend of mine who I actually just put together a productivity course with, Mike
Vardy says, that’s kind of like getting a bill in the mail and saying I don’t really
want that mailed now, putting another stamp on it, sending it to yourself again and making
it go through the postal system again to come back to you and while it’s in transit, it’s
not really real.
So there is that idea.
But it depends on how you use it and how you abuse it.
What is unique about this which I think might end up very relevant in the future is this
option: Pick a place.
So you can not just select a time and a date when the email will be brought back to you
but you can say a place.
Now you can also use this for reminders.
So you can say remember when I reach the grocery store that I have to get this.
So we can do some very much location-based delivery.
Similarly, you can have an email, if you have an e-ticket sent to you, you can say I don’t
really need to keep that here right now but send it to me when I get to the theatre.
I don’t know if that’s the best use of it but it gives you an idea of how it works.
You can set things up through the location services which as I said is pretty creative
and I think going to be pretty compelling.
My plan for this?
This is really a first look at this software.
I’m going to spend time with it on my Android phone and on my iPhone, spend some time playing
with it, using it, trying to get a little better handle of how it works.
I don’t hate the email client certainly.
I don’t hate the email client at all on the smartphone.
I think I like what I see.
I’m not sure I like it at all though on the desktop.
The desktop might be a big whole pass for me and I’ll stay with Gmail on the desktop.
On the smartphone, it does have the potential of becoming my main email client.
I hope that was useful.
If you have comments, please let us know below.
We are a community here on DottoTech and I’d love to hear your feedback.
If you like this app, if you’ve tested it out, if you don’t like it, let us know.
If I’ve missed something that you think is super important, by all means tell us and
I’ll make sure to pick that up in the next demo.
I read every single comment and appreciate all the time that you spend commenting there.
There are three ways to stay in touch with us her on DottoTech.
The first is to subscribe to this channel which we encourage you to do.
The second is to subscribe to our newsletter so you can hear about all of our live events
and webinars.
And the third is consider supporting us on Patreon.
We are a crowd-funded site.
In other words, a lot of the financial support for this site comes from you the viewers,
through Patreon and there are perks.
You do get benefits for giving us a little bit of support so I encourage you to drop
in the Patreon page and have a look.
That’s it for now.
Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!