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"Email is transforming into a habitat, the central place from which work is received, managed, and delegated in organizations", according to PARC's research in Taking Email to Task.

As emails are tasks, we need our email client to become a task manager. Yet, they are still the same basic design as they were 40 years ago, where every email is simply listed by the time it arrived.

The 3 Major Problems with Email

The underlying problem is that email clients make email reactive, not proactive. To use modern lingo, you are always "fighting fires" of incoming emails, all day every day. There is no easy way to turn emails around and dicate the schedule upon which you will handle them.

Pressure to do email instantly (interruption)

If you ignore email, it will drop off the front page of your inbox and likely be lost forever... it sinks into the swamp, it drops into the abyss. The easiest way to overcome this is to rigorously respond to each email as it arrives. But that comes with a huge cost: interruption. You have to stop work, log into your email client and switch your mindset to think about the topic of the email. It takes time, and it robs your short-term memory of the work you were concentrating on.

Ignoring email because of the unknown (backlog)

When email is not taken care of frequently, it becomes a black shadow at the back of your mind... a dark lake full of unknown - and probably undesirable - things. You avoid it partly because of fear of the unknown, and partly because you know it will take a long time to get through. And the longer you leave it, the worse both of those things become... a bad spiral into inaction. And ultimately, nothing gets done, and the people waiting upon you get upset.

No high level coordination (inefficient)

Emails are treated as one off, isolated exchanges; but they are the total opposite. They are part of projects, underpin larger conversations and lead towards goals. The lack of support in email clients for the "big picture" means replies are incomplete, emails are hard to prioritize and the direction of each conversation is unclear.

There are lots more little problems. It is difficult to know when your day ends, when each email flows in constantly and with no respect for your schedule - like waves breaking onto a beach for eternity. There is little recognition of the inequality of relationships, that some people - co-workers and customers for example - should be given faster treatment than others. And email is not an isolated system; it is the glue - the connector - between multiple systems, departments, teams and people.

ActiveInbox re-imagines email as a manageable flow of tasks, coming into your inbox and getting converted into useful output before completion or being passed onto others. And thus Gmail becomes a task manager.

The beauty in ActiveInbox is that it leverages natural workflow patterns, taking what we intuitively feel comfortable doing - organizing ourselves with email - and helping us be great at doing it.

The metaphor scales up to help tackle a global email problem

Taking a wide view of the landscape, Basex has quantified emails as a $650 billion drag on the economy, and we believe - as do our customers - that if every individual treated their email as tasks flowing efficiently through their inbox and between their co-workers & contacts, the global business world would be more efficient as a result.

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