Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am about to show you a new tool from the people at Sortd.
It’s a Gmail add-on that converts our email account into a to-do list of sorts.
It’s almost sacrilege, if the truth be known, but it’s a very effective, I think, way
that you might consider managing your email.
All of us struggle with getting ahead of our email.
Sortd might have a solution.
When I first took a look at Sortd, the first thing that caught my eye was their logo.
It’s a squirrel searching for nuts, which I think is a fine metaphor for you and I trying
to find the important things that we have to do in our email.
Regardless of how diligent we are in email, we all get behind occasionally and get frustrated
by email.
Well, the folks at Sortd think that there might be a better way to do things and they
think that email is analogous in a lot of ways to tasks.
Now that flies in the face of a lot of modern productivity philosophy where people, where
a lot of us like to distance email from the task and to-do list manager and look at it
in its own right.
Well, Sortd goes to the extreme other end of the spectrum and it treats emails as tasks
and as to-do’s which might well work in your world.
Let’s take a look at the software itself.
All you do to install is you go to Sortd, you sign up.
They enroll you.
They ask you to download an extension, a browser extension.
The whole thing works through the browser extension in Chrome for your Gmail account.
This only works for Gmail as far as I know at this point.
There is a mobile app which we will look at in the future if we decide that we like the
app after we’ve used it for a little while but for the most part now, this is designed
for Gmail users, I believe primarily in Chrome although there could well be other extensions
available.
They only offered me the Chrome download but I was looking at it in Chrome.
Having said all of that, once you’ve installed it, it then acts as a skin sitting over top
of Gmail and Gmail’s always available to you.
If I just click here, you can see I've got my good old-fashioned Gmail message right
there and available to me but here it’s in the Sortd interface.
Now we are using my real email account so I have to apologize; I’ll be blurring a
little bit more than normal but I had to show this tool in the real world, as you will see,
as we move ahead.
So essentially, the architecture of the app lays out this way.
Down the left-hand side is our inbox.
It respects all of Gmail’s, if you’re using Gmail categories, and they’re all
available here so we can jump back and forth into our updates or our social channel, whatever
we want if you sort your email that way within Gmail.
But here are all of the messages.
You can click on any individual message and you can read that message and you can reply
to it.
So let me just find a fairly benign message here.
Here’s a message from one of our followers relating to an email that I sent out.
You can see that we’ve got a fairly robust email interface with all of the main activities
that we might now apply to the email available to us here.
Now one thing I do notice is when I reply to email within this interface is it doesn’t
automatically archive it.
I have to click on the little Archive button in order to archive it once it’s all done.
But that is basically the email interface.
Now the heart of this tool are these columns here, which are basically to-do lists.
They’re little task lists that they’ve named To Do and Follow up and then they give
you List 1 and List 2.
Now I've renamed List 1 to Important Stuff.
You might name it, in their demo they’ve got it named as Deals.
There are a variety of different things.
If you’re working on individual projects, you might name it that project name.
But regardless of what it’s named, what you do is you take any of the emails from
your inbox and you drag it in.
This is something that I have to follow up on.
It’s an invoice that I want to pay.
So I can put this in.
I guess I could put it into Follow Up.
I could also put it into To Do, depending on how I process these lists.
So once you've moved it over here, it remains here and you have the option now with a little
dropdown to be able to mark it down as a completed task, to flag it for follow up.
You can edit the title of it.
You can do a few other things so now that email is essentially part of your tasks and
to-do list.
If you want to add just a regular old-fashioned task, you just click on the plus and we have
a task that has to be done, “Task to do.”
Once you’ve got that created, if we click on that we’ll see that we have a pop-up
that allows us to make notes on the tasks, to set reminder dates.
So it’s a fairly simple, rudimentary task manager as well from this perspective here.
Quick access to things like your contacts and calendar within Gmail are all available
from this interface screen.
I think they’ve tried and designed it so that you will stay in this particular screen
as much as possible but the heart of this system is this concept of finding your different
tasks as you go through and then moving them into the appropriate columns and then figuring
out how you’re going to process those columns as part of your regular workflow.
I think it’ll work for some people.
It won’t work for others.
I think the way that it probably would work best is if you go through all of your inbox
items at once here, migrate all of the content over that you don’t want to reply to immediately
into these different categories and then based on your own scheduling, work through one of
these categories one at a time or all at once, depending on how you want to do your workflow.
I certainly don’t hate this interface.
I'm kind of liking it a lot.
I know some of my colleagues will find this concept of combining tasks and emails as basically
heretical as far as modern productivity goes but I think it’s a pretty good idea.
I kind of like it and I'm going to use it for a little while and if I decide that I
like it, I'm going to keep using it because that’s how we roll here on DottoTech.
I hope that you found this video useful.
Take a look at inbox.
Links will be in our description below and if you use it, please let us know in the YouTube
Comments whether or not this is an app that works you or if not, why not.
That’s all the time that I have for today.
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Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!