Preventing the user shooting themself in the foot

Michael Hudson-Doyle michael.hudson at canonical.com
Thu Jun 30 14:26:48 PDT 2011


On Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:40:07 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
Non-text part: multipart/mixed
Non-text part: multipart/signed

not sure why notmuch reply is putting that there :)

> The lack of a "move to next thread" binding helps encourage me to form
> good habits. The goal I have when processing my inbox is to get
> everything *out* of my inbox. I can do that by deciding one of several
> common things:
> 
>     * I have nothing to do
> 
> 	In this case I should just archive the message immediately
> 
>     * I can deal with this message "on the spot" (such as a quick reply)
> 
> 	In this case, I should deal with the message, then archive it
> 
>     * I can't deal with this now, but need to later
> 
> 	This is the key scenario. The wrong thing to do is to leave the
> 	message in my inbox, (that just makes things pile up and makes
> 	my future inbox processing slow, demotivating, and
> 	unreliable). The right thing to do is to tag this message in a
> 	way that I'm sure I'll find it again when I will be equipped to
> 	deal with it. And then I can archive the message.

I'm come to strongly agree that this is the Right Way to process email
too, so should there be a keybinding for this last operation?  It should
tag the message (or the thread?) with, say, 'task', and then proceeded
as 'a' does.  'task' should be in the default searches you get in
the notmuch hello buffer.

I realize there is endless bikeshedding to be done on tag names and so
on and also on allowing people to choose their own workflow, but I also
think that this shouldn't stop the addition of a sensible default :)

Cheers,
mwh


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