GotIT: Gmail

As a prodigious filer of e-mail, I am not yet convinced that I Need gmail...because to adopt it means that I would be moving away from my hard-won mail management strategies that keep me sane. You see, I am a prodigious filer of e-mail, and a zealous deleter too.

I like a clean inbox, because I mostly use it as a view of mail that I must do something with - a de-facto to-do list. I know I can still do this with gmail...that's not the problem. In fact, I don't see any problems with switching to gmail except having to rethink the rather entrenched set of work categories that currently name my e-mail folders...and thereby...to rethink my work.

Ordinarily I am all about this sort of wholesale surrender to the fugue-state of inventio, but I just don't know.

What intrigues me about the possibilies of gmail's search vs. file approach to mail management, though, is the ability to see not just discrete moments of work in the form of individual messages, but whole threads. I've recently been working on projects that propose similar chronologically-ordered, thematically linked sets of communication events as useful units of analysis for understanding knowledge work and visualizing the composing process.

Perhaps gmail would be useful as a data collection tool for these sorts of endeavors? At least for projects that involve e-mail either as the primary medium for sending a message or as the platform for coordinating work via tasks such as file sharing, version control, and scheduling, to name a few. The article "Email as Habitat" by Ducheneaut & Belotti makes a strong foundational case for this, it seems to me.

Maybe I will try this for myself...perhaps using gmail for a specific project first before I switch alltogether. I'll report back when I have enough to say for a "TryIT" entry.