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Hold up... this is an extreme use of ActiveInbox & Gmail!

So we are clear from the start, we only expect a small niche to use ActiveInbox & Gmail as their full task manager. Most people use ActiveInbox as an email manager that handles most of the small, fast flowing and badly formatted tasks within Gmail; and keeps your main task manager unburdened and free to focus on the bigger picture. I.e. ActiveInbox works well alongside your regular task management system.

This is achieved by efficiently keeping as much as possible in Gmail, and exporting only a handful of big, or collaborative, or domain-specific emails to your task/project manager, CRM, issue tracker or knowledge base when it makes sense to do so.

This article, however, is about ditching as many of those other systems as possible - maybe even all of them - and doing all your task management inside Gmail.

Beware! Even if this interests you, we do not recommend it for new users. Try using ActiveInbox to manage your email for a few days first, and then come back and read this article when you're ready.

The Pros & Cons of using Gmail for task management

Pros

• Gmail is available everywhere - PC, mobile, libraries, internet cafes, etc.
• You can send "new tasks" (i.e. emails) to Gmail from anywhere, including using services that send mobile SMS text messages to email
• Gmail has nearly unlimited file storage
• Email is naturally social for collaboration
• Email is already the source, and means of delegation, of many of your tasks

Cons

• It is difficult to sort "tasks" (emails), as everything is listed by the time it was sent
• While emails are social, the email client is a strictly "single user" experience - you cannot share and edit a task between several collaborators (like you could with a Web-based project management tool)
• You cannot edit subjects, which means its hard to evolve the details of a task
• You cannot store information around project labels, or set deadlines for project labels

How to do it

The idea is simple - store all your tasks as emails that you send to yourself, and then use the regular workflow to process them.

Creating New Tasks

With ActiveInbox installed, you can click "Compose Self" below "Compose Mail" in Gmail to send an email to yourself (Compose Self may need enabling in your ActiveInbox Preferences). This is especially handy for putting a reminder, or sharing a file, in your email when you're moving between locations (e.g. from the office to home).

You can also create filters around Gmail's brilliant email-name convention, which uses the 'plus' symbol. For example, if you're email address is bob@gmail.com, you can send emails to bob+next@gmail.com, bob+someday@gmail.com, etc. and they will all arrive in your inbox. So the trick is to set up filters that detect +next in the email address, and automatically add the S/Next label to it when it arrives in your inbox, and also archive it. You can do this for any label.

You can even create a new Contact for each Status of task that you send to yourself. For example, in the example above you might create a contact called "Next Action" that has the email address bob+next@gmail.com. Then when you're composing an email to yourself, or replying to yourself in a conversation to turn it into a task, you can just send an email to "Next Action".

Categorizing Tasks into Projects & Contexts

ActiveInbox comes with lots of customizations to help you categorize emails. See Gmail Folders for more.

Scheduling the Tasks

ActiveInbox uses labels for the day & month, e.g. D/D/1 and D/M/6 are understood to be the first of June. You can find out more about Scheduling Emails in Gmail.

Adding Notes to Tasks

For this we use Gmail's conversations, which group together related messages into one long thread. How? Just reply to yourself on a thread (a built in ActiveInbox Plus feature) to add private notes on a task. See Storing Notes around a Conversation (task) for more info.

Completing Tasks & Projects

To complete a task, just remove all Status labels and add the S/Finished label (a one click process in ActiveInbox). This takes it out of the trusted system and understands it to be complete.

To complete a project, just rename the project label with the "Old/" prefix. For example, P/MyProject becomes Old/P/MyProject. Because you rename it, rather than delete it, all existing tasks are associated with it.

Using Tasks When Away from ActiveInbox (e.g. on a mobile device)

Because all "tasks" in Gmail are just emails grouped by Gmail labels, you can use them even when you're on a mobile device (or away from your regular computer). You just have to manually search on Status labels (e.g. search for Waiting On items with label:s-waiting-on).

Pipelining tasks through several stages

You can learn how to create structured paths for common tasks by reading Drive your conversations towards goals with projects.

This article also includes a tip on an alternative way to do "tasks" with Gmail: project sub labels. E.g. P/Fix Issues/Repair Status Button, where the task is 'Repair Status Button'. This enables you to group multiple emails around the same task.

How could it be made better?

A dedicated mobile client. We would be interested in collaborating with other developers here (tip: this can be easily achieved by using IMAP to treat Gmail like a backend database).

New features in ActiveInbox to overcome the limitations: editing subjects, re-ordering emails, etc. You can suggest more in the Community Forum.