If you read my last Freeloader Friday, you noticed that I have noticed a few budding task management applications. There are some cool new ones that show Web 2.0 promise.
But, after all my research I still came back hungry. And, after going over my expectations, I found out that maybe what I want isn’t a task list at all.
As I expect most of you do, I use my email inbox as a type of pending task list. When something comes in that requires action, I let it sit until I complete the task, then (as a Gmail user) I archive it. This works great for short-term tasks, but you can imagine if you sent your entire task list to your email, and let it clutter your inbox for weeks it would be quite a mess.
The solution? A “task boomerang” service. Here’s what I want to do: I have a task, say to write next week’s Freeloader Friday. But I don’t want to stare at it all week. So I send an email to the service, with a line specifying when I’d like the email sent back. So, then Thursday rolls around and I have completely forgotten to write my article, and email arrives in my inbox just in time to remind me.
Now, you could write a great web-based interface for managing all kinds of reminders - and Remember the Milk does this. BUT I don’t want to have to remember to go to a separate site to manage my tasks. I don’t want to take the time. Tasks happen in my inbox, so that’s where I want to stay.
Another must for a system like this is snooze. I want to get an email saying “Take out the Trash” from the system, but have a link in it that I can click to snooze it for 3 days. Given my sloppy knowledge of PHP and MySQL, I could hack something together, but I’d much rather a better programmer get it right without me having to butcher any code.
Its not that I don’t like the nice interfaces that come with these new task managers, its just that I’d rather be getting things done that enjoying slick AJAX.
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November 14th, 2005 at 2:05 am
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