I’m using Google Apps and don’t have the option to load any of the Labs items. I’ve read in other places that it’s supposed to be available, but I don’t have it.

If any other GApps users have the option in Settings and have advice, please let me know.

What I’d love is to have the possibility of dating a piece of mail and having it reappear at the top of the stack on the day I chose. Not in the calendar, but in the inbox, that’s where I work…

I haven’t tried tasks – thanks for the inspiration to try it.

The gTasks have a LONG way to go to get close to the GTDInbox features. It would be nice to have some idea of what 2.1 is going to give us UI-wise.

I think at the very least when you star or mark something as a next action you should either be prompted to see if you want to add it as a task or create a setting to make automatically adding as a task the default.

Conversely, when I complete a task, it should remove the next action status.

I guess having the ability to change the status in the task window would be helpful as well.

It should also automatically group tasks under a task group for the project if one is assigned.

Maybe even give you the ability to select a parent/pre-requisite task when it prompts you if you want to add it to your task list.

Shane, I’m a Google Apps user too (Mac) and it works fine. Email me off this thread and I’ll see if I can help – dan@dpnews.com.

Andy,

I second Daniel’s suggestion. I find myself using RTM to organize tasks, and GTDInbox to organize projects and email. There are times that I want to simply push an email off into the future, or have the processing of the email on a given day be a part of the Action. I still think it could all be done within GTDInbox if we had a actionable date field that we control which is attached to email messages (but I think I understand that you’re not actually creating any new data fields). Perhaps this date field exists now that Gmail Tasks exist?

I’m really happy with GTDInbox and although having subtasks might be useful, I do that already. What I’d like is the same as Daniel — have a way to get those due dates to the top, or to show or something. Sometimes I have stuff I have to take action on, but not for a while and I need a way to make sure I can keep track of due dates.

Nathan (Sudds) emailed me this, and – with his permission – I want to throw it into the mix here…

========

Thanks for the heads up, I think this will be a very helpful tool to compliment GTDinbox — I often have the idea of daily goals of things to complete from my inbox, and there are those short term things that suddenly pop to your mind that you need to capture quickly as tasks and GTD has been helpful for this but I could see this being even easier for those.

I just started playing with it a few mins after your email, boy it would be nice to share lists… especially inside google apps with others in your domain… and if the tasks list had a status that showed how many things were on the list outstanding…. some folders.. etc… it’s not GTDinbox! … so I agree that it will be a good complimentary tool but they both have their purposes. I almost see this as RAM task management…. and GTDinbox as the more permanent storage and fully trusted system. Tasks is a capture device…. and may be exactly what I needed. I would love to see a notes tool like this, to quickly add notes and store them in gmail.

Gmail tasks may be faster for capture, but GTDinbox is not far behind. It is much quicker than it used to be. But Gmail tasks doesn’t do much for me in terms of GTD; it is just a list, or a set of lists.

I disabled the Gmail tasks labs feature and will continue to use GTDinbox for its excellent functionality, applying Statuses, Contexts, and Projects.

Hey guys,

I’d also love to be able to schedule emails to come back at a certain time in the future to be worked on then … could we use the code behind the “bump” function of GTDinbox for this in some fashion … just an idea!

First of all let me thank you for spending as much time as you do with this system… it’s truly an awesome idea. I very much appreciate the functionality that you’ve added to the gmail world. That being said, the biggest problem I’ve had with the gtdinbox has been the lack of calendar support. I really like the outlook reminder functionality and would like something similar to that with the GTD inbox. Maybe I’m misusing GTDInbox? or asking too much of it however, it would be great to have some sort of calendaring of alerts – This kind of goes along with what others have specified above. Having the ability to make a task pop to the top highlighted would be very helpful.

The gmail tasks really don’t add much in my opinion – other than perhaps the short task list people already explained.

Google Tasks looks to be ok as a simple task manager but clearly doesn’t come anywhere close to the functionality provided by GTDInbox. For me the killer feature of GTDInbox is the way it makes such good use of Gmail’s labelling system allowing you to easily add multiple labels and then provides ways to look at your mails/tasks in different ways: by context, by project, by status etc. And it’s a simple task to change the status.
Google tasks is really missing a trick by not having integration with GMail labels (unless I’ve missed something). Having got over my initial resistance to the idea of creating emails to myself for simple tasks, I now realise that the beauty of this approach is that I only have to look in one place to see all my task – those generated by emails (the majority and those generated by email to self.

So in answer to the question about integration: I think that Google tasks could be a good way of handling those simple one off tasks that I currently use email to self for but I woud want to be able to tag (label) them using the same labelling as for emails and the ability to see them in a single view along with emails rather than having to go to two different places to see my tasks.

I agree with Dan. It would be great to have tasks that can be set for a specific date/context AND have it show up in your inbox THE MORNING of or THE REMINDER time (defaults apply here – by time, by day, day-before etc).

I love GTDINBOX – it has definitely boosted my productivity

The gmail task list is working great as an immediate capture / braindump tool.

gtdinbox is working very well as my projects/actions. I think they are complimentary and that you should not focus on gTasks as an issue. Keep iterating your own feature set based on user feedback and I think you will be on the right path.

I am at Inbox Zero every day…. thanks to GTDInbox!

Perhaps there could be a feature where Next Actions (or any/all checked emails) could be dumped to GMail Tasks where they could be broken down quickly into subtasks… And tracked somehow so that when the task is checked off, the corresponding email is flagged finished and other statuses removed.

I don’t actually see a perfect way of integrating GMail Tasks to GTDInbox at the moment because doing so splits functionality too much. The ease with which one can enter tasks is a big plus – my biggest wish of GTDInbox is a faster way of entering tasks. The way I do it now is to click Compose Personal, enter the subject as the task, Send it typically with no mail body, click OK to GMail asking me if i really want to send an email with no body, and I’m done entering a single idea.

Instead of that, I would like to see a separate Capture Tool for entering new GTDTasks/Emails, where I can enter a thought/task, press Enter, enter the next thought/task, press Enter, etc, until I’m finished and then GTDInbox would take all those lines I just made and create Email/Tasks that would appear in my inbox. That would be a killer feature for me.

Dan’s suggestion of having a virtual ‘tickler file’ (David Allen) where you can set email to reappear in your Inbox on a specified date is an excellent suggestion as well.

Wow — too many comments to read, but here’s mine:

“Of course, there is an alternative, and that is thinking about what a perfect task-list-system would be, and implementing our own…”

This is my personal holy grail. Email (as we know from GTD and implementation systems like Priacta) is only a SUBSET of this thing called communication. In GTD / Priacta speak (I learned GTD mainly from Priacta’s take on it) email is yet another ‘collecting place’.

So, here’s my perfect task-list system, since I live most my day behind email:

. an “email application”, like Gmail that collects my email BUT …
. with the ability to add tasks and “see” them like an email (see how Google integrates emails & GChat as “conversations” so I can enter “pick up milk” without creating an email
. label them as projects for multi-task items that are currently ongoing (GTDInbox does this well I believe)
. archive them so I can access them later like a filing cabinet
. calendar support so they can be time / day activated

This is a quick blurb … I’m sure this requires more thought (including access via mobile which via Gmail should be easy and possibly offline use) and would be happy to brainstorm it.

HOWEVER, it all comes down to this … the perfect system is one that models GTD NOT as an email application BUT as a task/project management system.

For my money that means the email features of Gmail are a SUBSET of the solution of which the real solution is built around all of that: collecting information (emails and otherwise), storing that info for processing, processing that info, ACTING on that info, and storing/archiving that info — whether that be a task, an email, a project, or whatever.

That’s what GMail (or any email application) is missing, and GTDInbox comes close!

Getting excited about the possibilities,
Brett.

Perfer to use Tasks from RTM system..

YPK

Having not had a to do list for a long while I have recently started using the goosync task gadget in i-google – it is useful to have the Most Important Tasks for the day highlighted – everything else is in GTDInbox. I think something that flags up MITs would be useful somehow

The new i-google is really useful for me and a GTDinbox gadget would be handy showing Next Actions – or being able to choose labels.

“does anyone have any thoughts on how they’d like to use Gmail Tasks and GTDInbox?”

Last year I was turned on to the GTD methodology. Then I kicked Microsoft to the curb.

I drifted in the land of undones until 3-weeks ago, when your kick ass plug in rescued me.

Immediately, i saw some holes, namely the lack of a “braindump” facility (I emptied it elsewhere). Once i had a list, I was easily able to use GTD to PRIORITIZE my workflow and regain my long lost sanity.

Then here comes GTasks. A partner asked me what I though today. I see a perfect match.

* GTasks is the database. The bucket, the brain-dump waiter. One or two clicks and whatever it was is out of my head and safe for later.

* GTDInbox is the logic. The engine, the prioritizer that lets me spend that last hour of the day, prepping for tomorrow.

Today is a Great Day.

GTasks are not good enough yet for GTD, It should be integrated with Gcalendar and Igoogle, also tags are important. Something that I would love is the ability to add approximate time slots in both Gtasks and GTDInbox and a tag cloud (label in Gmail) for all projects, contexts and status.

I agree that Tasks could be a way to add dates to GTDInbox items without changing the database (unless Google comes to that). But the Tasks program seems to do little with those dates: one can’t search on them, sort on them, have them pop up in Google Calendar, etc. They are linked back to the email conversation, however, so if they did pop up somehow, or could even be sorted, then one could use them handily with GTDInbox.

I think a integration with RTM & GTDInbox is the most obvious place to go. RTM leaves GMail tasks on its ass having waited years for tasks from GMail if this is the best they can do then they should have not bothered. I know now i can star in gtdinbox which drops me a task in RTM . But with greater collaboration i am sure you create a fantastic system.

Remember do not invent the wheel if you have good wheels already

A lot of people have been mentioning Calendar features, and reminders to bump things back up … I agree that would be a great feature… in the meantime I’ve been using Google Apps / Google Calendar and adding anything future dated to Google Calendar with default reminders on that specific calendar so that I get sms text/email/ at intervals I feel best suit that particular task (i.e. I have different calendars with different default reminders and add that item to the calendar appropriately). Is anyone else using this type of thing in the meantime? I find it very helpful.

The other thing that makes this valuable is a new Firefox Addon called IntegratedGmail — this was a Greasemonkey script for a long time, but I only became aware of it as it moved to Firefox Add-on — I strongly recommend checking this out, put your Calendar as the first item, then Gmail as second… you end up with an easy to toggle 2 week calendar at the top of your gmail interface.

Here’s the link http://www.integratedgmail.com/ Check it out as a potential help for the calendar issue while we’re all discussing new ways to make this happen.

I totally agree with this idea

” Daniel Says:

December 9th, 2008 at 6:34 pm

What I’d love is to have the possibility of dating a piece of mail and having it reappear at the top of the stack on the day I chose. Not in the calendar, but in the inbox, that’s where I work… ”

Just what we need

Most of my work occurs via email, or if it involves a phone call or personal presentation, then there will be email follow-up. I have tried using separate task lists in MS Outlook, RTM, and now in Gmail tasks. The essential problem is that as soon as I create a task list outside of my email, then I have yet another list to keep track of, update, etc. It doesn’t matter which list tool I use, the problem is with having a separate task list and having to keep it up to date. The same applies to project notes. If I make notes outside email, then I have yet another place to look for information and yet another set of documents to keep up to date.

I have found that the best solution is to create a GTD Label Prefix D/ in GTD Settings. Then, I have created labels for days of the week, weeks of the month, and months of the year like so:

D/Day/1Sun
D/Day/2/Mon…

D/Month/01Jan…
D/Month/12Dec

D/Week/1
D/Week/2

Going back into GTD settings, I have these appear as inline drop-downs in GTD Inbox.

This lets me assign specific dates to email strings. If I have to assign a task to myself, I can use the Reply to Self feature in GTD. Since I have multiple email accounts going into and out of Google Apps Gmail, I have had to set up a workaround for this, but that is generally how I do it.

I’m pretty new to GTD and it’s already helped with organisation. I use Gmail and Google Calendar religiously and would like to be able to add GTD Task items to Google Calendar.

If I add a future date for something to be dealt with it goes into a task list on Google calendar as well (as per the existing “Remember the Milk” calendar app) for that day. Perhaps there is the option to have the task emailed to you on the day you want to deal with it and/or added to daily task list.

To be able to delay a take until a date would be excellent. The S/Some Day is OK, but to define a date for some day would be extremely useful.

Or like the previous entry
S/Delay/2 days
S/Delay/21 june 10
etc

I use the “Better Gmail 2″ plugin for FF and it does alot of this. I also built out a bunch of labels like “for followup” and “waiting on internal” that do the rest. The only thing this seems to offer is a bunch of macros that do alot of these tasks like searing date periods and such quick and easy.

With that said, it butts heads with BG2 and for that reason I had to uninstall.

You know what, scratch that. I disabled Better Gmail and everything works just as good – if not better then before. Forget what I just said.

A long time GTD user, I have always used Outlook with David Allen’s plug in.

I would love to be able to move to gmail entirely to manage my work flow, but there’s one thing that I can’t figure out with GTDInbox that GTasks might help with. The issue is that if I get an email from somebody, the task becomes whatever the subject line of THEIR email is. As a real example, I now have an email in my inbox with the subject line of “Here’s the Thing”, and the next action is for me to discuss our summer travel plans with my wife in person before responding to this mail. Having a task (or email in GTDInbox) called “Here’s the Thing” is not very useful for me, but creating a NEW task via email will break the link with the thread I’m in.

The GTD Outlook plug-in allows me to easily create a new task called “Talk to wife about travel plans” while maintaining the linked to the email thread “Here’s the Thing”, so after I talk to my wife, I open that task, mark it as complete, or create a next action (still linked to the email thread) called “reply to John about summer travel plans”.

Maybe I just need to play with GTDInbox to figure out ways to do this, but the power I appreciate is a separate task list that’s intimately linked to my inbox as 90% of my tasks come in via email, and will eventually require an action via email, BUT to be able to specifically name the “next actions” as David Allen preaches, vs. naming them whatever the subject line happened to be.

If it was possible to do this with GTasks, I’d switch in an instant!

I also don’t like using emails which are usually reference material for the task as the title of the task. You can make a compromise and accept each unmodified gmail subject as implying “respond to …”, or you ‘reply to self’ then click ‘edit subject’. Then you can call it what you like. All the emails will be copied into the reply, along with mailto: links to click on to reply. Clunky, but it works. Your task will not be part of the gmail “conversation” of that subject. My feeling is that this feature is vastly overrated anyway.