Mailbox co-founder Gentry Underwood didn’t have a whole lot to say about the product release that we were meant to discuss when he came by the PCMag office earlier this week. “It’s Mailbox on the iPad,” he said.

“Sounds pretty straightforward,” I replied.

So I asked him instead about the philosophy behind Mailbox: What is it really meant to do and who is it for? Those are the kinds of questions that pique my interest, especially as fodder for my weekly Get Organized column about organization in the digital world. They sparked some enthusiasm in the otherwise calm and composed Underwood, too.

Gentry Underwood: If you ask David Allen(Opens in a new window) what GTD [the “Getting Things Done” philosophy and book by the same name] is about, he’ll say it’s not as much about getting things done as it is about appropriate engagement. It’s not about doing more, it’s about having everything in its place.

There’s this psychological principle called the Zeigarnik Effect. You’re probably familiar with it—you may not know it by name, but you’ve certainly experienced it. You know when you get a song stuck in your head and it’s just like, looping over and over again? Our minds are wired to hold in our short-term memory a set of things that we need to close the loop on, that we need to finish. So a song can get caught in that trap—but also a handful of things that we need to be doing that we keep telling ourselves not to forget. We tend to load that stuff up into our short-term memory and it becomes a kind of a state of anxiety that we carry with us as we go around in the day.

The underlying philosophy behind something like Getting Things Done is that you take everything you might otherwise hold in your head as an open loop and you do something with it. You do it. Or you ask someone else to do it or delegate it. You drop it, which is to say you decide you’re not going to do it. Or you defer it to any number of places. In the GTD world, you might put it into a folder for tomorrow or you might put it off into a project that you’re going to get to at some point. When you do that, you get to a place where your list becomes empty, as it were, and that comes with an amazing, almost euphoric peace of mind. Suddenly all the little voices, all the little plates you’ve been spinning almost unconsciously in the back of your mind—you’re not spinning them anymore. That noise is replaced with a kind of quiet.

JD: Do you have other productivity apps that you like that you use?

GU: I don’t. I use the yellow Notes app [for iPhone and iPad] still. I use Clear sometimes. I’ve been very impressed with gestural things that the Real Mac [developers of the Clear app] guys designed.

I don’t use Evernote. I use Dropbox, ironically.

For me, email is kind of a catch-all. I find myself writing myself emails, as I know a lot of other people do. It acts as a sort of de facto to-do list.

We use Asana now at work, which I’m trying to get into the habit of. I struggle with it a little bit. Their mobile experience is a little rougher than their Web stuff, and I’m trying to live only on iOS devices to become a more active tester of the iPad app.

JD: So you’re not using desktops at all?

GU: I’m trying not to, yeah. I feel like it’s the best way for me learn what’s going to work and not work in the iPad world and what the opportunities are.

JD: How are you finding it so far?

GU: I struggle without the keyboard. I really like the iPad mini. I have one of those [pointing to new iPad] with a Retina display, and while it’s beautiful, at a pound and a half it’s really too heavy to hold in your hand for any amount of time. This thing [the iPad Mini] is just over half a pound and at a third of the weight it’s an entirely different experience. But the footprint of it is so small that typing either on the glass surface or a keyboard that’s similarly sized—your fingers are all crammed together. And I can’t quite get around that piece.

JD: Do you use dictation at all?

GU: I do on the phone. I haven’t really used it hardly at all here [on the iPad mini]. I don’t know if you’ve seen Google’s most recent dictation …

JD: The Google Now stuff?

GU: Effectively, yes. It’s really amazing the way it auto completes your sentences. You can actually watch it change in real time. [Activates Google Now] “This is a test. It’s changing while I’m speaking.” [The app plays a chime to indicate the speech-to-text is completed.] It’s so cool. It’s getting really great.

The challenges around dictation are more social. These things [such as the iPad mini and iPhone] go with me into the world. It’s not the same as sitting at a desk in a room. In fact, if I’m sitting at a desk in a room, I’m probably at a more traditional machine. So if I’m on one of these things, I’m out in the world where it’s just often awkward for me to speak to my mobile, either because it’s going to disturb other people or I’m uncomfortable having them hear what I’m dictating.

It’s hard. It’s hard to find the overlap of places where you’re using one of these devices and yet speaking to them isn’t awkward. The adaptive auto completing and spell correcting and guessing, it all helps. But it’s still a distant second to being able to just compose on a keyboard.

JD: We had a conversation in the office yesterday about who could touch type. Most of us can, but there are still a few people who hunt and peck furiously.

GU: There’s got to be some way to take advantage of that mobile-ly. There’s still an opportunity there that no one has quite cracked. Think about those many times when you are in a public place, like on a train or when you’re waiting for something, and you don’t want to talk to your phone. This is ridiculous. You’re obviously not going to carry around a big keyboard, and increasingly people don’t even want to carry around laptops. Especially in a world where you just have this [picks up iPad mini], how do you get to that “fingers move faster than my brain” thing into there?

JD: I don’t know.

GU: I don’t either. But it’s an opportunity.