Rob Barrett

Gmail does it again — say hello to Tasks!

Posted on December 11, 2008 at 11:10am

Just as I was heading to bed last night, I spotted a new link at the top of my Gmail page announcing the arrival of Google Mail Tasks under the Labs programme.

Obviously I couldn’t go straight to sleep without checking this out first, so I spent a few minutes having a play around with it. Wow — I was very impressed!

It appears to be a very basic add-on, but for me it’s perfectly timed — I was just about to be billed for another month of Basecamp, which I don’t use much (it doesn’t work well for me to have three or four different sites to go to just to keep up with my work), and I was wondering what I’d use as a possible replacement.

Google Mail Tasks does everything that I need it to:

• Set different lists for seperate clients
• Indent tasks, so that I can group sub-tasks under a main project check-box
• Rearrange the order of tasks
• Set a due date for a task
• Write associated notes for the task
• This is the cool one — from the ‘More Actions’ dropdown when viewing an email, you can ‘Add to Tasks’ — this creates a new task item linked back to this email

I’m not sure that I’ve come across all of the features so far, but these alone make this a fantastic free alternative to the many small project management tools that abound on the internet!

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