> His main point is that adding an assortment of labels, tags, and priorities to your email inbox only serves to give you the illusion of getting work done.
Which I understand, because Mann has a tendency to get into the fiddly bits, and so do I, but what's missing is that these things do potentially have utility. Case in point: I get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of non-spam emails a day. I used to use Apple Mail until it couldn't really handle the volume very well, then I switched to Gmail and learned the keyboard shortcuts. Eventually I got into labels. The UI makes it super easy to apply labels, and I label every important email. This could be considered "shit work", but it provides a solid ROI because it allows me to browse through project summaries, and makes it much less likely for things to slip through the cracks. It's amenable to automation in that I can create rules, but mostly it relies on my ability to tag every single email. It sounds like a lot of work, but once the system is in place it doesn't actually take any time to hit 'l' and autocomplete a label or two.
Meanwhile, Google's attempt to improve productivity without shit work—Priority Inbox—actually provides me negative value. It doesn't matter how good it is because if it's less than perfect I can't trust it, and it can't ever be perfect because countless externalities affect my idea of priorities. In the end, the assigned ratings become more noise that I have to deal with.
So while the point about not letting busy-work make you feel productive is a valid warning, it doesn't follow that if it can't be automated it isn't useful. It's all about ROI. I think the problem with Twitter and Google+ is that they just aren't useful enough to sink that much time into unless there is a direct professional purpose.