I have been using Google Inbox Beta for a three weeks now on my iPhone and I’m mostly disappointed. I want to like Google’s new take on email management, but I’m afraid I’ve found Google Inbox to be extremely tedious and unhelpful. There are some winning features here, but many of the would-be advantages are lost due to flaws in the design. If I wanted to make an app that would make it harder to get through email, I’m afraid I might look to Google Inbox for examples. Yikes.
Let me break it down for you.
Google Inbox Reminders
Google Inbox adds the ability to assign a note to an email so that it becomes a “todo”. This is a nice idea, but since assigning a reminder note to an email does not remove the email from your Inbox, nor put it into any kind of GTD list or context so that you can batch-complete the work, the Reminder feature just offers a whole new way to procrastinate and never completely cleans out your Inbox.
For this paragraph, let’s pretend there is a physical representation of that. Picture your desk having a physical inbox on it with lot of papers inside. You pull one of the papers out and look at it. You then decide to put a sticky note on it saying what you’d like to do with the paper, and then you set it back on the top of your Inbox. That last part is where the mistake lies. The paper just sits there getting in the way of your other inbox items.
In fact, Google thinks this is a good thing. They encourage you to “pin” things to your inbox. What the heck. Until you’ve tried it yourself, it is hard to describe how silly and imperfect the analogy is. In my mind, when I pin an email I have prevented myself from being able to archive or delete the email by accident. This is not the case. Pinning is the same as starring an email. Google has it wrong twice. Not only does the user pin emails where they don’t belong, but they don’t stay pinned either. The fog of confusion really settles in the first time you attempt to remove something from the trash and put it back in the inbox. In order to do this, you have to pin the trashed email. Pinning items is synonymous with the inbox. The inbox icon is even a thumbtack. This would lead you to believe that all items in the inbox must be pinned then. But that’s not true either.
So why should you bother pinning an email? It was a long way to get here, but here is my answer: Instead of pinning emails, Google Inbox should have been designed so that a reminder would function as a pin, ensuring the email cannot get lost. You do remember that we’re still talking about reminders right?
Ready for the next stunning realization? If you archive an email that has a reminder on it, it still shows up in the reminder list. Oh my. Reminders do a better job of keeping an email pinned than the pinning feature does! I found this hilarious!
So they did do a few things right here. It’s nice to write down what you plan to do with an email. This would be great if the email did not remain in the Inbox. Part of this problem is solved by the “Snooze” feature, but not entirely. We will discuss Snoozing in the next section.
One final note here is that marking an email done/archived still leaves the email in the Reminders list. So let me get this straight… Is it not done? Is it not archived? There doesn’t seem to be a way to mark a reminder completed so that it disappears. The only way to get it out of the Reminders list is to delete the reminder. That’s like digging a grave in a cave. I guess Google doesn’t want me using the Reminders list as a list of unfinished reminders. It wants me to look at the incomplete reminders mixed in with the completed ones, in case I need a dose of nostalgia.
This app is full of ironic contradictions. All of the right features are here, but they are used at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and for the wrong reasons. If Google Inbox were a thermostat, it would chill the house in the winter, and heat it in the summer.
Let’s review. Pinning doesn’t pin. Marking things done doesn’t mark things done. The inbox doesn’t even function as an inbox; it is more like an actual box where you move in all your stuff and then make it your new home.
Never leave the inbox again.
Snoozing Emails
Being able to natively snooze an email until a future date is pleasing, but the limited number of on-screen options make me believe that Mailbox by Dropbox has already done a better job with this, making it faster and easier to pick preset dates. It seems like a simple fix and Google should fix this detail.
The most helpful aspect of snoozing is being able to snooze an email until you reach a particular location, provided that you supply the street address of that location. When I saw this requirement I mentally thought, “Ew.” I’m sure it will work for some people, but I would really appreciate being able to snooze for an area, such as San Diego, CA. If I want to be reminded to go to the zoo there, for example.
What would really set Google Inbox apart would be to add the ability to snooze an email so that it can only be seen from a computer and no longer from the phone. This would be excellent for emails that must be completed from a computer, for example.
As odd as it sounds, the snooze feature ends up being Google’s best method of cleaning out your email’s inbox. Albeit temporary.
Deleting Emails
Don’t get me started. Google continues to insist that archiving is the way to go, even though 98% of all emails get deleted, not archived. Mailbox by Dropbox makes deleting email available by tap or swipe. So simple and necessary, and yet Google hasn’t addressed it yet.
Lists
Google Inbox does not assist in making lists except with Reminders and filtering only pinned items. The only true lists that Google Inbox offers is the “Categorization” feature, which is deeply flawed and cannot be trusted. (I’ll dig into categorization later.)
Making lists manually is a feature strongly required by any fan of Getting Things Done and Google Inbox doesn’t provide it. I hate to say it, but yet again Mailbox does offer an advantage that Google Inbox does not. Simplicity beats complexity any day.
Categorizing Your Downfall
The main feature of Google Inbox is a weak attempt to clean up your Inbox by grouping emails into categories, such as Finance, Promos, Updates, and Social Networks. But since Google automatically puts things into categories based on the sender’s email address, I can’t train it to know the difference between marketing emails vs updates that I need to know right away that both come from the same company. (Specifically, the same email address. e.g. noreply@mint.com)
Auto-categorization is also terrifying, because it attempts to perform this “magic” automatically for you, at all times, without your consent. You know that scary feeling you get when an important email may be somewhere in your spam folder? Well now imagine that multiplied by a factor of 10. And you must now spend most of your time chasing down emails that have ended up in the wrong category. Even photos that were texted to me over Google Voice–a Google service, ironically–came into my email incorrectly categorized as “Updates” as if it they were newsletters. Terror and frustration.
Tell me. What’s the difference between a reminder email that tells me that I have a bill due in 7 days, versus an email telling me I should try out this new credit card with better cash rewards? Well, there is no difference according to Google Inbox if they both come from the same address. And that is a total failure of organization on their part. Categorizing emails the way they do it currently is complicating something that cannot be simplified any further, thus making the problem more complex than the original problem. This is a common mistake for many productivity software applications.
Even on Google’s terms, attempts to recategorize emails are slow and tedious. I’ve noticed that performing a recategorization of an email does not update any other emails in that filter based on my actions. So I still have to do the grunt work of pulling each and every email from noreply@mint.com, for example, and removing it from a category I don’t want it in. One move action should be enough! This is a nightmare if I have dozens of emails from the same sender already in my inbox. And why should I do all the work if the automatic categorization of email is flawed anyway?
What is the point? I honestly can’t see the point of categorizing email at all unless I’m categorizing it under the next action required to complete and delete the email. For example, a list of things to do at a computer that can’t be done from an iPhone would actually be helpful.
Summation
Google Inbox has increased the number of taps required to read and delete email. They’ve also increased the paranoia that I haven’t read all my email since they hide emails behind an automatically chosen category.
I took a quick look on the PC side, and it appears Google Inbox now requires a lot more screen real estate than Gmail, and it is considerably slower than traditional Gmail. I realize that it is in beta, but I can tell just by looking at it that the direction they are taking is a terrible one. As a power user, I deeply want simplification and speed, not wasted screen space and slow animations. Save that for Google Plus (a product I actually like.)
What Google Inbox Should Do Instead
If Google really wants to make something awesome, Google Inbox needs to group emails by subject line, and/or by sender, and then allow mass deletion of those groupings. Make the delete option readily available. If they are going to put something in a category, then they need to also stop sorting by date and instead group by sender under each category. That might actually be helpful! Experience has taught us that the fastest way to clean up an Inbox is to group by the sender, not to categorize by the sender.
I know what you’re trying to do. I know you’re trying to contextualize emails so that when a human brain is in “Finance” mode then they can look at a lump of “Finance” emails and deal with it all at once. But really I think you need to group emails not by category, but by similar Reminders and/or Senders. Imagine if you could see a Reminder that says “Get my vacation photos off of my laptop” and you could drill down and see every single incomplete Reminder that also uses the word “laptop”? You could then complete all of these at once when on the laptop. Wow. That would be nice.
Add a read counter. Add a snooze counter. Get real with me about how many times I’ve looked at an email and how many times I haven’t taken action.
Also, how about an auto-delete feature? It would be so incredibly useful if I could automatically delete daily digest emails (such as the one sent by Google Calendar) as soon as the latest one comes in. I don’t need more than one copy. If I haven’t checked my email for a week, I don’t need 7 copies of my agenda. In fact, there are some emails that I don’t need for more than 16 hours. Adding expiration dates to emails would be the single most revolutionary feature for email and Google really is the only company who can do it.
If I could say one final thing to Google regarding Inbox, it is to look at the name of your product. It is called Google Inbox, not Google Revolving Pile of Clutter. An inbox should be a one-way flow of information processing just like an answering machine. Help users clean up their inbox and get organized properly. Don’t just shuffle stuff around in the inbox and hide things. Anyone who has taken a GTD course can tell you that’s an unpleasant source of stress.
Thank you for reading.
[Hello people of the Internet! Do you like the way that I think? Want to hire me as an analyst for your software project? Get in touch.]