Tagging Mail with Events or Tasks

1. Aharon Varady March 18, 2008

   I’ve been tagging my events according to task, project, meta-project goals, and visions in Calendar. If I could connect my discussions archived in Thunderbird with these events (and also archive my personal documents in a similar schema), then I feel like I’d have my mental map pretty well layed out. Great idea. Thinking of implementation — imagine if a drop down list of events was available in Thunderbird and derived from the events listed in Lightning/Sunbird Calendar.
2. Dan March 18, 2008

   I don’t know if this is what you meant, but I’ve wanted to link disparate objects that are nevertheless related somehow (like a calendar event and an email) for a long time now:

   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218535

   I don’t actually want a tag as such, more like a notepad/sticky note sort of thing where I can jot down whatever I want, including links to other objects (like a todo list, calendar item, web page, file on disk, etc).

   You could parse and index the added metadata and produce tags from that, I suppose. That would be very handy for searching.
3. Joshua Lock March 18, 2008

   Hi Bryan,

   Sounds like you might want to take a look at Chandler[1] from the OSAF.
   I’ve not actually used the software properly yet but from reading Dreaming in Code it sounds like you might like their “siloless” design for “stamping” items with different properties.

   1.http://chandlerproject.org/
4. will March 18, 2008

   I use tags that are:

   - project based (everything in my life is a project and each project is a set of projects)
   - location based (home, work, Worcester, store, …)
   - priority (super important, not very important, could care less)

   It’s interesting to note that like Aharon, my project tags are related into projects and sub-projects. Is it interesting to have tags related to one another with “is-a” relationships?
5. poelcat March 18, 2008

   Wow! Some really interesting convergences here that I’ve been thinking about and watching for a while.

   You seriously need to read (if you haven’t already)
   “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg.

   http://www.dreamingincode.com/

   There was a recent post on the Chandler blog talking about integration with Thunderbird. http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/01/18/thunderbird-plugin-for-chandler/

   And interestingly enough Chandler explored the GTD email road too: http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/03/14/chandler-and-gtd/
6. Bryan Clark March 18, 2008

   Aharon: Right on! I think that’s the direction we need to look at.

   Dan: I think we’re on the same page with attaching calendar events and todo items to emails. Perhaps “tagging” is the wrong term, but connecting the two such that you can search and sort by either.

   Joshua & poelcat: great links! thanks for the pointers, I should spend some more time reading over the chandler projects blog and notes.

   will: i’ve never seen the location based tags before. I’m wondering if the sub tags are like project tasks? The is-a relationship makes sense and it also makes me wonder if a deadline for those tasks make sense as well. Lots to think about!
7. Murali March 19, 2008

   If you want to add notes to the emails, then try Xnote at
   
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3093
   It adds xnote tag to the mail, making it easy to find later.

Post a Comment »