If you haven’t yet, check out Streak. It’s pitched as CRM for your inbox and if you watch the demo videos on the homepage, you’ll see that it is a great stripped-down CRM with some unique features on account of being right in the middle of your inbox. Basically you create pipelines of stages, then you start putting stuff (ie customers) through the pipelines as their status changes from lead to sale.

However I’m not interested in Streak the CRM, because it’s so much more. The concept of pipelines has so many more applications. Some of these Streak rightly boast about on their homepage: bug tracking, hiring and customer service. But I don’t use Streak for any of these, for me it’s a todo list. One thing I hate about traditional todo lists, is that they are way too focused on the todo, and don’t reward you enough with the todone. Once you’ve done your thing, it’s gone, poof! erased from memory and don’t wait up because here’s what you need be doing next.

There have been a few attempts at making todo lists more focused on accomplishments - for example iDoneThis where you write a little ‘daily diary’ saying what you did that day - heck I even made something similar myself with DayScore. However all of these are work - you have to remember to go to the site, or write the email, and generally they don’t integrate with your existing todo lists.

Here’s a screenshot for my Streak pipeline ‘Learning/Reading’ where I keep track of books I’ve read and online courses I’ve taken or want to take:

Why is this amazingly awesome? Let me count the ways:

• Every time I check it I’m reminded of what I’ve accomplished so far - the things I said I’d do that I followed up and actually did. Don’t underestimate the power of patting yourself on the back.
• Not every task can be split into ‘pending’ and ‘done’. With Streak you can name your pipeline stages to whatever you need to fit the type of task at hand. For example, if you like to have a few books on the go at a time, ‘ongoing’ is a very handy stage, which doesn’t exist in most GTD-style apps.
• It’s right in my inbox. This is the killer feature for Streak. I was going to check my inbox anyway, so it’s right there, in my face telling me what to do next - which makes it that much harder to procrastinate look at cat pictures on Reddit instead.

Anyway that’s Streak. If you have time, check it out.

Ok just one cat picture…