Google is continuing to attempt to improve its many productivity applications with features that are commonly found in a desktop equivalent. The most recent improvement in this initiative are the additions of task generation inside of Gmail. The only problem is most users don't know how to turn on the task feature inside of Gmail. I'm not exactly sure why Google didn't enable the feature by default but turning on the task list features is easy and using the new task lists for creating to do items is absolutely wonderful.
Personally the ability to create a simple to do list would have been a major disappointment for me. The most exciting feature is the fact that you can create task item out of an e-mail from right inside of Gmail. This feature adds a very important part of Outlook 2007 directly into a web client. Whenever I receive an e-mail with something inside of the body that I'm required to do in Outlook 2007 I can easily just click on the follow-up button and have the e-mail added as a task item automatically. I can then add reminders and other alerts to remind me to complete whatever task has been described as an e-mail. This is a feature that has been sadly left out of most e-mail applications both web-based and desktop-based. But the Google to do list feature allows you to perform just that action. Enabling Google to act as my second brain. Okay enough chitchat that talk about how to enable and use that to do this feature inside of Google Gmail.
Ok so the first thing that you have to do is enable the Tasks lists option inside of your Gmail account. Login to your Gmail account and then in the upper right hand corner click on the link that says "Settings". Now this will open up the settings tab for your account. Now click on the tab that says "Labs" which is right next to "Themes" and "Web Clips" in your Gmail account. Inside of the Labs section you are going to see a number of features that Google is releasing but I guess they don't feel is ready for primetime.
Now the first section that is listed is for the Tasks Feature. Here you enable the feature for your email account. Also in this spot the describe some of the shortcuts that you can use with the GMail tasks integration. Now in the left hand side right below you contacts button you will see a new button for Tasks. When you click on the tasks button you get a nice floating box that will always stay on top of the emails that you are working in.
If you click the title bar of the tasks widget it will minimize itself to a very small window which is great when looking through all of your emails.
Hot Keys for Gmail Tasks
1. When you are inside of an email that you should follow up on, you can choose "More Actions > Add to Tasks"
2. When working inside of the Tasks window pressing "Enter" will create a new task.
3. Tab and Shift-Tab allow you to indent and unindent tasks. I use this feature to remind myself that I am working on a task but may have not completed it yet.
4. By pressing Control-Up and Control-Down will let you move the selected task you are on up and down the list using the keyboard. You can't do that with the mouse so it is a good thing to remember to help sort your tasks.
5. Hitting Shift-Enter brings you to the detailed view of a task. This is where you can set options relating to that task including the due date and additional text. Unfortunately there is no way to automatically send out a reminder email when a task is getting close to a due date.
When Google finally integrates all the features from Gmail into the features on their Android mobile operating system they are really going to give Exchange and the MobileMe service from Apple a true run for their money. If I was Apple I would be especially worried since the release of MobileMe was so wrought issues.
