ActiveInbox is not a direct replacement to your task manager, instead it relieves your task manager by specializing in managing the tasks in your email.

One of our primary perspectives is that emails are just badly formatted tasks and resources, and as such email has become a habitat where work is received, managed and delegated (see PARC's Taking Email to Task paper for more formal thoughts on this).

Emails, when thought of as tasks, have unique properties: they are small, fast moving and ill defined. It does not make sense to move them to your main task manager, which takes considerable effort only to see it get clogged up.

With ActiveInbox, you can manage as much as possible in Gmail and leave your task manager (if you still need it) to focus on the bigger picture.

Some common ways to create connections between Gmail+ActiveInbox and your task manager

• Receive a task in email (e.g. a customer request), evolve it through discussion, and move the final agreement to your task/issue manager. Include in the new entry a link back to the email discussion in Gmail. The rapid discussion takes place in the best place for it (Gmail), and many emails result in just one action in the other system.
• Represent your task manager projects as labels in Gmail. You can link to label searches in Gmail, so you can store that link against the project in your task manager, and pull up all related Gmail discussions with a single click.
• Let your task manager direct your email activities. Schedule daily blocks for processing emails to manage your time, weekly reminders to conduct a weekly review and guide the emails that need to be sent for important projects/people. For instance, if you deal with investors (which could be any other important group for your job), you might have a monthly reminder in your task manager to email them all to share the latest relevant news and keep the connection alive (tip: we suggest a context label for all these emails, such as C/Investors, so you can pull up all previous engagements - you can even set a Gmail filter to automatically apply the label based on email addresses).

What to do with an email once you've moved it to another system

Using the principles of GTD®, we advocate maintaining "hard edges" between your lists. That is, if you've moved an email to your calendar, provide a link back to the email but do not give it an active Status. If you've moved the email to a task in another system, either send the email to that system or else provide a link from the task back to the email, but do not give the email an active Status.

The idea is that an actionable item should only appear on one list (calendar, tasks, next action emails, today emails, etc.). Each list represents a distinct purpose, and it is critical they are kept separate from each other. (In the words of GTD, "if they lost their edges and begin to blend, much of the value of organizing will be lost").

Distributing actionable items throughout multiple systems is perfectly okay (e.g. your task manager, your email, your desk), so long as they are fully functional within themselves and enable you to complete all the tasks contained therein. Then it is simply a matter of dedicating a little focus every day to each system. (We do advocate having a 'master' system that coordinates your projects, responsibilities and goals; and schedules time for each sub-system - but that can be as simple as a text file and calendar).