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Handle — To-dos + Email + Calendar = Focus
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Armando Osuna
This is really good.
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Hunter
I've been waiting for this for years. Too many people use their inboxes as their to do list, and know that it's not right, but can't stop. I used to use things for tasks and mailbox for email. Now...Handle.
Going to have to try. I've been wanting something that combines my tasks, email and calendar, but have yet to find a good one. In Gmail I use Active-Inbox and Streak. On my phone I use acompli. For a lot of my tasks, I'm using Trello. So many services, but why can't I get it all in one place?
In ActiveInbox I can organize some emails as tasks in a GTD format, but overall that's just still labeling with some built in filters. I convert emails to events which show up on my calendar, but they are then in a different tab, not in my email tab. Hate google tasks, so sometimes I make an email and add it to ActiveInbox as a task, other times it goes into Trello.
@golocalapps you are right on. Use projects in handle for GTD and have a next action that shows in timeline to make the project approachable, our locations (Home, Work, Whole Foods) use iPhone geofence to get your attention plus there are reminders in time like mailbox snoozing.
Suggestion - add a get appstore link via text to your landing page. Just tried searching "Handle" in iTunes and got a huge amount of autosuggestions that weren't you. Or you need to fine tune your keywords.
The video is pretty great. Persuasive. It felt like a movie trailer.
The onboarding is on point. Basic gmail sync, plus Handle recommends you install Handle for desktop + sync devices by (I assume) using its to-do list feature. Swoon. The Chrome extension could use a bit of work - I feel like it should prompt me to add a Gmail account right away - but it does access your dropbox to store its data.
There is big overlap in functionality with Inbox from Google which I personally use and love. Not sure how Handle is going to survive with such a competitor
I have pretty intense filters in gmail, is there a way to have this app just show me unread mail? It's hard for me to use with all the git commits and automated junk that ends up on team mailing lists.
@radiofreejohn Agree we need this John definitely on the roadmap. You've implemented your filters using Gmail tabs? Normal filters can be set-up to route straight to a label and skip the inbox, but the filter creation is a bit painful. I'd like to know how you've done it so we can built it properly.
@shawnvc I use filters with labels. I never made the conversion to tabs. I have two kinds of filters – mark as read and label, and star/mark as important, but also label. I make heavy use of Gmail's "Important" messages. I'm happy to send along my exact filters if it helps at all. I realize I'm a serious edge case, but I also really want a tool like Handle for handling things on the go.
I WOULD love to try this but we already use Asana / Gmail / GCal. I know I can sync nr 2 and 3 - how about that first one? Integrating with Asana could be killer! Thoughts @Shawnvc?
Best I've found, it's all my productivity system in one app. Calendar, email, and todos in one place. Fuuuuuuck. Thank you!
i've been playing around with this the last couple of days.
the app is really slow, makes it kind of unusable for me. but i'm pleasantly surprised by how handy the chrome extension is (basically just a simple todo list that sits next to your gmail and can create todos-from-emails).
looking forward to the app getting faster/more stable. google inbox wins on that front (but, at the moment, loses by not supporting google app for your domain).
Thanks for taking the time @aristeinberg or sorry for the slowness. Would love to hear more specifics shawn@handle.com. We have been A/B testing the cards view (renders HTML previews in the inbox) vs. scan view (like other email clients) and the card view feels a lot slower unless the network is snappy. I'm curious if that is the issue or something else. Definitely working hard to make everything as fast as possible!
Amen @marketergraham, at Menlo I looked to fund a company solving email overload for 5 years before having the idea for Handle. Siri provided the inspiration (I was on the board). If only my inbox knew when/where/how I wanted to act on this damn email! As we built the product, we discovered it was less about inbox zero, and more about not letting your inbox tell you what to do all day. The email + to-do synergy is the key, by processing the inbox quickly and working off the contextual timeline you are aligning your time with YOUR priorities. I've cut the time I work out of my inbox vs. Handle Timeline by about 50% and spending much more time focused on the needle movers.
Thanks for checking Handle out Anton. Are you able to run your day out of Google inbox? Handle wants to be your trusted system with a full inventory of all your to-dos, David Allen would say that's 100-200 for busy people. In my usage, having cross-platform mobile + desktop is essential as well.
@shawnvc I do manage all my to-do tasks in Inbox and it works fine for me (on Android, web and iOS). Although the biggest number of tasks I have to take care each day is rarely more than 10-15. I can't even imagine having to perform actions on 200 tasks in a single day! :)
@abredykhin ah, it's not how many you have to do in a day, but rather your entire inventory, home, trips you want to take, books to read, movies to watch, the whole inventory. When your mental RAM is occupied with remembering details there's more space for being creative and staying in the flow. Everything actionable you want to remember goes into the same trusted place.
Also, Exchange is ~80% of business email market and Handle will be email server independent eventually. Lots of other fun stuff in the roadmap but we're not revealing it all just yet... ;) Thanks again!
Hunter
@abredykhin I do like the "pin it" feature in inbox, but their task management is not full featured enough. There are no projects, no GTD and it doesn't seem like something that is easily added. Handle is elegant
@abredykhin renaming an email thread with the actual task you need to do, and grouping to-dos (email related or not) by project are other dimensions. I just answered this Quora post that has more. We're working on explaining what a 'productivity system' is vs. an email client, to-do list, or calendar alone so open to ideas! http://www.quora.com/What-are-th...
Tell me more @esdapp, what exactly would you like to see with the Asana integration? We had to build the to-do list from scratch because nobody 'wraps' email threads in to-dos or has the necessary context required to keep signal/noise ratio high enough on the to-do list (location, time, projects, etc.)
