w00t!

it just gets betterer and betterer (as a 5 year old i know says)

ffolliet

i use the stars, but not as a to do list... i use yellow to sort my imports from gmail #2 and i use red for the family "fwd,fwd,fwd" jokes. good pointer

igooledher

ez10

Oddly enough, the query above doesn't work for me. The query I had to use looks something like:

has:blue-star OR has:red-star OR has:yellow-star

Also, it is interesting to note that any emails that had a "superstar" designation prior to enabling labs don't seem to be "yellow-star", even though it is the same icon.

dangerp

Simple and sexy. I like it.

dangerp

now that is cool . not that i have a lot to do .. but still

coderneedsfood

I use RTM's Gmail module.

nka

This is awesome ! Lateral thinking. :)

Jeet Blog

little point, the search, as above, didn't work for me. the search for red star code is (l:^ss_sy)

ffolliet

This is a very good idea. I've been wanting to trim my Labels list down for a while. I just converted my !Action, !Someday, & !Waiting Labels over to Red, Yellow and Orange superstars balls respectively.

Also updated my mail filter that watches for emails with +task or +action to automatically add a red-ball. Unfortunately, you can't use a ^ in a label name when creating filters, so to work around it, I just made sure the red-ball was first in the list and set the filter ti star the conversation.

Incidentally, here's the full list of label-names to query on:
   has:yellow-star (or l:^ss_sy)
   has:blue-star (or l:^ss_sb)
   has:red-star (or l:^ss_sr)
   has:orange-star (or l:^ss_so)
   has:green-star (or l:^ss_sg)
   has:purple-star (or l:^ss_sp)
   has:red-bang (or l:^ss_cr)
   has:yellow-bang (or l:^ss_cy)
   has:blue-info (or l:^ss_cb)
   has:orange-guillemet (or l:^ss_co)
   has:green-check (or l:^ss_cg)
   has:purple-question (or l:^ss_cp)

Saibot

cool, but until there's a way to rename/rearrange existing quicklinks and chose the order of sections on the sidebar, it's just going to drive me crazy being so almost nearly really great.

zackrobbin

I have been using stars as a to-do list for quite long, but never knew about this trick, will try this out.

Keith Dsouza

NOTE: There seems to be a difference between the "original" yellow stars and the "new" yellow super-stars.

I haven't used the super-stars at all, but I was curious about the search. I found that "old" stars that I had used before the super-stars feature was added do NOT show up when I search for yellow stars. Those messages do appear if I use the normal "Starred" link, but not if I search for "has:yellow-star" or "l:^ss_sy"

However, If I now tag a message with a yellow star (whether it had one before or not), then it is found by searching, as well as the "Starred" view.

(I guess the work around to this problem would be to use the "starred" view, then remove and reapply the yellow star to all the messages. But there's a (minor) problem with that too: you can't select multiple messages and star them, so you'd have to go through them one-by-one).

Anyone else see this behavior, or am I doing something wrong?

zkam

This is a dumb question, but ... what is the advantage of creating this quick-link for to-dos over just using the regular starred label view? If you use all your stars for different types of to-dos, then you can just use the starred view -- with a shortcut of "gs".

Just curious -- I might be missing something here.

leo.babauta

Nice trick, but the only feature in Gmail that I am really missing is to be able to sometimes disable the threaded view and display messages in chronological order.

I very often have situations where a group of people is involved in several email exchanges regarding different projects. When I later need to issue my invoices and - on the other hand - verify invoices of suppliers - I need to find emails from each individual from each thread. In a typical email program it's a piece of cake - I just sort by name and date. But not in Gmail. When I search for name, I always get full threads and and I have to sift through them (sometimes as many as 40 messages in a thread) to find just the one that I need.

The same applies to search in general - when I search for a keyword, I would like to see just a single matching message, not the full thread.

If Gmail introduces the ability to switch between views, it will become a perfect email client for me :-)

Marcin

neat trick, now the really cool thing would be to somehow get it integrated with google calendar and hence make use of the sms alerts..

aebohlin

Ok, to make this a "true" killer application. How to I create a bookmark on the iPhone so that it opens the quick link view? I've been trying with diffent approaches but do always end up in the start view

Could it be that I'm using Swedish language in the settings?

BlackSmp

Great idea, but would it kill Google to put something like this into GMail or Calendar officially? What is taking them so long!

TimmyGUNZ

@leo.babauta:

I agree, I just started using gmail as my work email as well as to do list with the stars and I love having the "gs" shortcut available.

I just need to settle on how many different "types" of stars I want. Right now I have Exclamation=Do asap, Red star=High priority, Blue=Waiting on something from someone else, and Yellow=when I have time. Really I don't think I should ever have more on my to do list than I can reasonable scan through i.e. <20 or else my issue is bigger than just organization.

libertao

Amazing feature, love it!

blackbelt

Great Tip! I Use Thunderbird. Is there a way to reflect the color/status change within Thunderbird? Thanks for all of your great tips!

ninelives1972

Another tip: set a quick link to "in:inbox OR is:starred OR is:unread" to quickly view all email you need to do something about.

dave1010

@leo.babauta:
Leo, I figured the same way: use the star to view All Actionable items. But I setup Quick Links to zoom in on the individual categories, Action, Delegated, Someday/Maybe, etc.

Saibot

@Marcin:
I have found it helpful to sometimes forward a particular message from a thread to myself with a different subject line so it'll be easier to find later. Maybe you could start forwarding the individual messages to yourself as they come in with a keyword (like invoice) and client/vendor name in the subject line, then setup a filter to auto label those messages as invoices. That way you can just query for the label and you'll have the date and client/vendor name (and possibly the invoice number if it's in the first line of the message) viewable from the search results screen.

Incidentally, another helpful trick to more easily find threads later is to just add keywords or quick notes to the thread by replying to myself without changing the subject. It just adds your own personal little commentary to the thread.

Saibot

RememberTheMilk with the Gmail firefox addon is much nicer in my opinion. It's what I use. It even has google gears capability so there would really be no advantage this way whereas RTK seems much cleaner and more full-featured as a to-do manager.

adjohnson916