Google essentially implemented FollowUpThen and Taskwarrior in Inbox via snoozing and reminders. I can honestly say Inbox has significantly changed my life. I have to use email every day already, so overlaying task management has been a huge boon. I have a recurring reminder every Sunday night to take out the trash. I set up reminders to go off in 1 year (like when I sign up for something and don't want it to auto renew). I basically setup a reminder for everything I have to do. And since I have Inbox open all day long anyway, I never forget anything anymore.
I was searching the comments for someone saying this. Snooze / archive to achieve inbox zero is life changing. I have one simple rule. If I can't do something right now, I snooze it until I think I will be able to deal with it.
The knowledge that it will not be forgotten is very cathartic and my inbox doesn't fill with emails I intend to deal with but haven't yet.
I think what people forget is that time is often a better folder system than folders, as it doesn't place the responsibility to check again on the user.
I've tried to evangelize and I can't understand why it hasn't resonated as much with others.
> I've tried to evangelize and I can't understand why it hasn't resonated as much with others.
Perhaps it's a trust thing? It only works if you're 100% sure that a snoozed email will come back every time and no later than you told it to. Is it reasonable to trust Inbox to do that? Probably, but people have to be convinced of that. And note that for some of us, trusting the magical AI-enhanced black box that Google tends to build is a little on the hard side.
I don't think it's that at all. Truly. I think it's a trust thing of the opposite sort: people don't trust themselves to comfortably (and actively) forget non-critical tasks, which is what the OP does with this method. I think lots of folks keep things in their inbox because of two reasons: 1) removing them feels like loss, and increases risk of ultimate forget, and 2) you can't effectively set a reminder for something you haven't actually read and understood, and most people don't even read the majority of the mail they receive.
On number 2, that's not entirely true, you can be like "I'm not reading this now, I'll snooze it until x when I'll go through some emails"
For me it's all about reducing noise level and cognitive load. It's made me a lot more organised, although occasionally I keep pushing things back and won't admit that I'm not going to do them because I feel like I should do it today but I probably ultimately won't. Curse my fallible humanity!
The "snooze hell" is extremily unproductive if you ask me. Quite often I end up creating an avalanche of reminders just by snoozing/deferring individual tasks until "later" instead of deciding when/where to actually perform the task, so I can continue focus with whatever feels more inportant at the moment...
I think people think it means leaving gmail behind. Even if you tell them they can carry on using gmail, I guess they think it will leave a mess of duplicate emails or conflicting state between the two.
If many tasks/mails are coming everyday and you are snoozing them to the future, you are adding more tasks/mails to your future inbox, which in turn will motivate you to snooze them again, feeding the task monster. Until one day there are so many snoozed tasks that it is overwhelming.
That's when you have to make some hard decisions about what you will, and what you'll never get to. At some point you should just start deleting tasks.
The important stuff floats to the top and gets done. The rest doesn't.
Hey Google, thanks for making Inbox!