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Gmail's Priority Inbox and email overload
Several people have asked my opinion of Google's Priority Inbox, the newly announced Gmail feature that promises to help users "identify your important email and separate it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters." (See Google's explanation.)
I haven't used the feature yet, so I have to offer a grain of salt along with my comments. But I understand the gist of the thing: Gmail watches who you email, which message threads you reply to, and allows you to flag certain threads or senders as important - and then shows those important messages more prominently in the inbox.
So - what do I think of Priority Inbox? My short answer is what I tell people a lot for any feature: if it works for you, if it actually makes you more productive and less stressed, then great, go for it.
My longer answer, though, is that I don't understand the need for an inbox feature like this. The inbox should be a temporary holding location only, before emails are spirited off to a better place: an archive, a folder, a todo list, the trash, anywhere but sticking around in the inbox.
Here's a thought experiment. If you were hired to design a subway platform for the best user experience, what kinds of features would you make available? The train comes every few minutes and the platform is already clean and well-lighted. What else would be helpful - perhaps some bench seating? A vendor selling quick things like water and candy? All good ideas.
Now how about this proposal. Someone is offering to bring in a sit-down restaurant and a yoga studio, right there on the platform. Interesting ideas, but are they necessary?
The inbox - at least for people who empty it at least once a day - is like the train platform. Messages are headed out soon, so beyond a few basic features, there's no need for shiny new tools that offer to keep things under control. The solution to email overload is already available, for free, without any extra technology. (I've been teaching an easy solution for over ten years - here's a quick description I wrote recently.)
But Priority Inbox, if it's implemented well, will probably do just fine. This is because of the reality of users and Google's business goals:
• The user reality is that most people don't practice bit literacy. Instead they maintain an inbox of hundreds, or thousands, of messages, a jumble of personal notes, meeting invites, attached photos, long-term action items, reminders, spam, and urgent todos, all constantly competing for the user's attention in one chaotic mosh pit of a pile. For users who have to endure this day to day while still holding down a job, a feature like Priority Inbox might make their overload slightly less stressful. Priority Inbox doesn't offer a cure - just a patch for some of the symptoms - but as I say: If it works for you, go for it.
• The business reality is that Google benefits from this feature by (a) making it more difficult for users to leave Gmail, once they've set up their Priority Inbox filters (because who's going to switch to Yahoo Mail if they have Gmail calibrated just how they like it?)... and (b) encouraging users yet again not to delete their email but to store everything on Google's servers... and the more of your data that Google stores, the more intelligently they can serve you up to advertisers. (But then Gmail is free. As the Blues Brothers would say, whaddya want for nothin'?)
Personally I won't have much opportunity to even try out Priority Inbox, since my inbox frequently has no messages at all inside. I won't be able to mark any of them important. (If you'd like to solve email overload for yourself, once again here's my quick post on how to do so.)
Still, I can't help but think that Google is missing an important opportunity with this kind of mail feature. Yes, lots of users might get some incremental value out of Priority Inbox. And Google certainly gets immediate business value out of it. But imagine if Google actually tried to eliminate email overload for all Gmail users, regardless of the alignment with their short-term business goals. This might yield some very different features: for example, a prominent display of how long it's been since the inbox was empty; or a graph of the lowest message count in each 24-hour period in the past month; easier ways to get action items out of the inbox and onto a todo list; sorting features to allow for bulk-selection and delete (Gmail still doesn't allow sorting by sender or subject!); and so on.
So far, Google has opted not to develop those types of features, and that has opened an opportunity in the marketplace. Plenty of entrepreneurs are surely paying attention. I hope Google is, too.
The reason you can't sort by sender or subject is that you don't need to. The search 1: has fields for sender and subject, and 2: is much, much faster than manually flipping through all mail by one person or subject.
You can create filters to delete things for you, and you CAN bulk select and delete from search.
I won't use priority inbox because I already set gmail up to do all of the filtering for me. The todo list still needs work, and the stats would be moderatly interesting, but these are minor points.
Same boat. I rarely have any messages in
my inbox, so I doubt I'll see this much. I'd love a gmail feature that shows me mailings I never seem to open. Basically, a Suggested Unsun list.
I don't use gmail but I seem to recall it has an "archive" feature that works quite well for emptying an inbox, so it seems to me that they are already closer to helping people get to 0 than say Microsoft Outlook, which has no such feature at all.
Agree 100%. If there are more than 10 items in my Inbox at any given time, that means I'm not organizing my day very well. My Inbox is a 'To Do' list where I have either very urgent tasks or tasks that don't fit neatly into other lists. I've never been able to understand how so many people could just let the detritus accumulate...
I feel the same way. I can't stand to have email in my inbox. I either delete it, archive it or put it on a to-do list for later. But I guess if you have an email inbox with 100s of emails just sitting there, this might help. But wouldn't it be more productive to figure out why you have 100s of emails and do something about that?
I'm in fervent agreement. You can read my opinion on priority inbox, which I totally despise.
I've not tried Priority Inbox Yet! The fact is I'm using another Email Management software Taroby, which allows me to empty my inbox, easily by showing me what's important, and Take appropriate action on those emails first. I agree that there is no point in leaving your emails in your inbox, if you're able to take action on each of them pretty quickly. Check out www.taroby.com for more...