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Why use email as a to-do list, when it's obviously so poorly suited for the role? Why not use email for things email's good at, and use one of the wide variety
by aaronem 11y ago
Why use email as a to-do list, when it's obviously so poorly suited for the role? Why not use email for things email's good at, and use one of the wide variety of to-do list tools for task tracking?
When you need to refer to an email from a to-do item, there's ways to do that; some clients support direct hyperlinks, and others can be dealt with by just including the date/time and sender or subject of the email in the to-do item's notes, so that you have the information you need to quickly find the message via search. You can also include excerpts from email, or even whole messages, directly via copy-and-paste; after all, it's not as though they are going to change once received, so there's no sync problem to manage.
Granted, this might seem like being more effort than just mapping task list semantics onto email. But the article under discussion here chronicles its author's essentially having reinvented every task abstraction all the way up to the project, solely in order to overcome the inherent drawbacks of trying to use email as a task list. It seems impossible that this could be easier than just finding a task list tool that has the features you need, and learning to use it alongside your preferred email client.
- pjc50 11y agoQuite a lot of people use their inbox as a task list where the task is "respond to / deal with this email". The problem here is that such a task list is world-writable and chronologically sorted.
- aaronem 11y agoRight, I get that, but the point I'm making is that the tool isn't suited to the job it's being used for. "Deal with this email" could mean anything from an immediate off-the-cuff answer to a trivial information request, to a project that takes days to complete; email clients generally provide no good method (or just no method, period) of capturing and tracking such tasks, because that's not the job they are designed to do. Worse, as you rightly note, if your email account is also your to-do list, anyone can add to it as frequently as they like. This may or may not make an actual difference in the amount of work you have to do, as for example in a case where you get ten different emails all pertaining to the same task, but it might well have a psychological effect, and it certainly makes it harder to keep track of what you actually need to do. I mean, I don't know. I'm not here to tell anyone they're wrong to do what they've found works for them. But every time the subject comes up, I hear a lot of people saying that what they're currently doing really doesn't work for them, and they've been as yet unable to come up with a better way. From the entrepreneur/innovator side, these pleas tend to be met with yet another attempt to solve problems with email which only exist as a result of making email do things it's neither designed nor well suited to do. I think people would be better served by instead suggesting the use of a tool which actually is suited for the job they're trying to make email do. There are lots of task list managers out there, and almost any of them will do the job more ably than yet another attempt to cram email into a paradigm to which it so plainly isn't suited.
- creshal 11y ago> Why use email as a to-do list, when it's obviously so poorly suited for the role? Why not use email for things email's good at, and use one of the wide variety of to-do list tools for task tracking? I've no idea. Some mail clients even give you one-click ways to directly turn emails into todo tasks (ex.: Thunderbird with Lightning, and I think Outlook as well).
- greggyb 11y agoOutlook certainly does, but the problem remains that an email has a defined grain, the message. Tasks might be much more granular. It's not very easy to make multiple tasks out of a single email, nor track progress separately on those tasks. I'm currently in the progress of streamlining my to-do list, but it's currently a private git repo of text notes, with some shell scripts to extract to do items from arbitrary notes in the notes directory. I'm probably going to start using emacs's org mode for this capture and tracking. I use a few lightly nested folders in Outlook (most are single level hierarchies) and I use the to-do flag simply to make the emails related to my actual to-do list easy to recall. Task tracking is external to email, and the to-do is simply a holding area for "sorted, not completed".
- smacktoward 11y agoBecause email is a tool you already have. "Go get a proper application for that" entails a lot of work, including things that can be cognitively difficult like sifting through the giant sloshing sea of half-finished code that is the Internet to pull out a few good candidates. So it's not hard to understand why using a tool you already have (and already understand) would be more appealing.
- aaronem 11y agoI suppose it doesn't have to be a proper application; I've seen people manage to-do items in Windows Notepad and it seemed to work for them, God knows how. I tend to think in terms of task list management tools because I've gone to the trouble of setting up a CalDAV server and integrating all my computers and devices with it, but the general point could (and, as you point out, really should) be less "you need to go find an app" and more "try thinking about to-do lists in any terms other than email, because anything else will probably be less painful".
- galfarragem 11y agoI wish I could check email in Evernote. Or a Gmail where I could edit notes. If somebody from Evernote is listening..
- pmlnr 11y agoYou'd only reinvent Emacs.