Convert your emails to actions in one click | Hacker News Reader

Convert your emails to actions in one click

blog.taskforceapp.com

24 pointsniccolop13 comments

I'm totally confused about how this works. The blog post and the home page didn't clear it up for me. Integrates with Gmail? What does Broadcast mean in this context? What do you mean, in your blog post, when you say you can now "archive the task".

Confused. Am I the only one?

It's a "Getting Things Done" thing, I think.

http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-get...

The relevant idea is that you take the stuff coming into your inbox (which represents obligations that you need to take care of, in theory) and then immediately convert it into something like a to-do list.

Right.

But how, exactly, does it work? Can I use Thunderbird? Outlook Express? Gmail? Is mail, or anything else, stored on some other site? Does it work on all platforms? All browsers?

Thanks for the feedback.

I understand your point about it being unclear.

Right now you can use Taskforce within Gmail. We are looking to do outlook and other email clients. The emails are stored (archived).

In terms of browsers we currently support: Firefox and Chrome, and we are looking to do safari soon.

We are creating an app that should help you deal with your overloaded inbox, by allowing you to create tasks from emails (thereby hopefully allowing you to archive if you like); and turning 'broadcast' emails from: twitter, linkedin, facebook, CC's (as we define broadcast - not necessarily directed at you but notifications) you've been included on and turning them into an 'activity' feed.

This combination of tools, we think should reduce the amount of unread emails in your inbox.

Wow, I can't tell you how much you need this. It's ridiculous how many emails I make a mental note for getting back to and then completely forgetting them. (Sorry if you were a victim of my short term email memory loss, just bother me again)

I get around this by archiving emails as I complete them. If completing them just means reading them then they get archived immediately. If I need to refer to them later in the week I just leave them in my inbox. If my inbox gets bigger than 15 emails then I'm doing something wrong :)

I have Taskforce installed but haven't found it benefiting me yet.

This feature seems to be required by so many people that I'm surprised that few desktop apps actually provide it. Thunderbird does, with its Lightning (and Google calendar) extension. The still-not-ready-for-widespread-use Chandler (http://chandlerproject.org/) project was another attempt at this.

I built a prototype of something that had the general idea of this for myself (I have no short term memory, I mark off emails to get back to), but wasn't so well integrated with gmail. I'm excited to play around with something that looks so awesome.

The page looked pretty good in chrome which had me thinking about what it would look like in IE8. Big Surprise, not so good. Depending on your market you might want to add some IE aware CSS.

I'm unlikely to switch from Things to Taskforce, but I would pay for a Gmail->Things "Convert to Task" button.

I star (gmail feature) emails that are actionable. Archive the rest. Then work through the starred emails as part of my daily run. I'm not sure what value this app ads over that system other than allowing me to add my summary in the task name.

Thanks for the feedback.

Taskforce is meant to allow you to stop staring items, create tasks, eliminating them from your inbox (by archiving them for example).

Eliminating 'broadcast' emails is also another very useful feature, in our opinion.

i'm glad you built this, however, i would appreciate it if your app integrated with a todolist of my choice (and then used an open api to swap data freely). it's bad for productivity to use email and todolist in the same place.

thanks.

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