An Actual Joyent Workflow

An Actual Joyent Workflow

Saturday, June 24, 2006 4:32 PM (permalink)

For the past few weeks I have been revisiting the Joyent collaboration suite as, at the very least, a brainless way for me to archive emails from my IMAP server at work, since it is very easy to add Joyent to Outlook and write a quick rule to send a copy of everything to Joyent's inbox. I got a Joyent account as part of my hosting package with Textdrive, but after some initial frustration with its earliest iteration, decided it just wasn't baked enough yet to be of use.

I checked back on Joyent last month, however, and was pleased to see that progress had been made, and while the app still feels like a beta, it is, at least, pretty usable and extremely flexible once you get under the hood. The Joyeurs have promised another update very soon which will solve the main problem--speed (GMail puts it to shame) but it works, and it works surprisingly well as a central tool to organize your workflow.

Let's say you are a devotee of David Allen's ubiquitous Getting Things Done, or GTD methodology, and you loves you some lists. Well, Joyent's flexible framework of notifications, smart mailboxes and tagging system actually works very, very well--much better than GMail, if your desire is to tie your central task list to your email.

Here's how I do it. First, I work primarily in two areas of the site: Connect, and Mail. Connect is the primary collection screen for Notifications, which are used as a collaborative tool to flag emails, dates or files for others in your workgroup and add tags and comments. But Notifications are also great when you are El Lobo Solo, an Army of One like me. I need to have two sets of lists--a list of actions by context (stuff I can do on my computer, stuff I can do while traveling, etc--fairly standard GTD here) and a list of my active projects. The Connect tab lets me keep the two lists separate.

Start on your Connect page, and start making yourself a series of smart groups by clicking the '+' next to smart groups, and entering a name (@Calls) and adding a tag of the same name. I have a bunch of these, all preceded by an '@', to signify an action I need to take.

Since this list is sorted by context, not priority, I also created an additional smart group, seen here as '@!!!', for things I have to do TODAY (I also tag them with the appropriate context as well). If I don't finish things in the @!!! the day I tag them, I suffer gastrointestinal distress. (No, really. You don't want an endoscopy if you can help it.)

So here is my list of smart groups;

Your mileage may vary. I also have a smart group for my travel itineraries--it's just handy for me. So now you have a bunch of context/actions in smart groups on your Connect page. Now it is time to click on the Mail tab, and start creating Smart Mailboxes, one for each active project, as opposed to context--this keeps everything nice and segmented. Here is my current list:

These are created the same way that Smart Groups were made on the Connect page--just hit the '+' sign, name the mailbox, and then add a tag for the project.

So now you are ready to work--and the workflow part is pretty easy. All you do is get your mail into Joyent, and then process it on the mail screen. I open each mail, and decide if I need to keep it. If I don't I delete it, but if I do or it triggers an action I tag it with at least 1 and up to 3 or 4 tags. The first tag is the project (which should be an active project, so it should already have a smart mailbox--you need to use the same tag.) If there is an action associated, you also tag it with the correct '@' context. So, in this example, I have an email related to my upcoming presentation at the Corporate Podcast Summit:

I tag it with 'podcastsummit' (which matches the tag I used to define my 'Podcast Summit' smart mailbox) and, because it is an email I need to write, I tag it '@computer."

This will put the mail itself archived in the right mailbox (which I can delete when the project is over--it is just a virtual box, after all--the orginal email and its tag persist and can always be recreated) and put it in my @Computer Smart Group on the Connect screen. If I need to add a clarification about what the task is, I simply add a comment at the bottom of the email in the Comment field, another great Joyent innovation.

Finally, if the email triggers an actual hard action that I have to do (as opposed to @Waiting For, @Someday or @TravelInfo) I take one more step--I add a notification:

Since I am the only user, I click on me (duh!) What this does is put the email itself into the main message list of my Connect screen, so it becomes a master task list of everything I have to act on:

You can see that I can click on the various contexts if I need to make calls, or collect stuff to take with me on my next trip, but the main screen lets me see everything I have to do, all at once.

I then move the email to my Filed mailbox and get it off my mail screen. Job done.

When I complete an action, all I do is select the message on my main Connect screen, then de-select the @tag and the Notification (but I leave the project tag). It then disappears from my Connect screen and the @context smart group, so it is no longer a task--but it stays in the Smart Mailbox for the project so it is there to review.

When I am offline, I can either print the @Calls screen to take my calls on the road, or I can subscribe to the RSS feed for the smart group (everything has an RSS feed, another great feature) and access it on my phone from NewsGator Mobile.

Anyway, as you can see from some of these screenshots, this is a working system, and I have lots in it at any one time. As ad hoc tasks come up, I either just do them immediately or pretty soon, or I just send myself a quick email to my Joyent account and process it later. Works for me, maybe it will work for you.