How to Turn Gmail into a Task Manager

It’s no secret that Gmail has a Task Manager. We’ve blogged about this before on GT as well, and others have weighed in their views on it too. I have my very own way of using Gmail as a task manager on its own though, which will without a doubt interest those of you who like to use less, rather than more, different application.

How my system started

I receive a lot of emails that contain within them some sort of a task for me to complete. Although you can create a task from an email by clicking on ‘more actions’, and then ‘add to tasks’ in Gmail, I found a faster and easier way of keeping track of my To-Dos.

Working with stars

In the good old days, before multiple inboxes were introduced, I used to star important messages that contained some form of to-do, or needed urgent attention. This worked reasonably well, as I could easily sort my messages and look only at those that were starred. Using stars to create a to-do list within my inbox became even easier when labs introduced superstars. With multiple inboxes though, I can take my task managing one very large step further and separate work to-dos, from personal to-dos and from very-important-and-crucially-urgent-to-dos!

Combining stars and multiple inboxes for a perfect Gmail Task Manager!

The first step to creating a task manager within Gmail, using your email messages as reminders, is by deciding how you want to split up your tasks. If you want only one central To Do list, then all you need is one separate inbox that filters out all messages labeled as ‘to do’ (more on how to do this later).

I like to have a separate list for items that are very urgent. I am currently experimenting with two ways of accomplishing this:

1. By always labeling urgent messages as ‘urgent’.
2. By adding a star to my urgent messages.

The benefit of the second option is that you can further define how urgent a message is by using the different ’super stars’. A red exclamation point is the most do-this-before-anything-else-urgent in my inbox, and then a yellow star just means urgent. In my life, urgent also means I need to get to it within 24 hours. It is up to you to define your own task managing language, but here is how I do it:

Setting up multiple inboxes to manage your tasks

If you only need one place to keep all your to do’s, you just need to create one extra inbox within Gmail. Do this by:

1. Going into your labs section in Gmail.
2. Now you need to scroll down and activate the option to create ‘multiple inboxes’ within Gmail. You will see this option somewhere midway down the page.



Although multiple inboxes are now enabled, you need to actually create them before you see a change in Gmail.

3. Click on Settings in Gmail to start creating additional inboxes. Within settings, there is a tab dedicated to Multiple Inboxes, after you enabled the feature in Labs.
4. Click on Multiple Inboxed and you will see this screen:
5. Now you can create the rules by which different messages will be filtered into your different inboxes, or a.k.a. your different To Do lists. An example of how I organized my inboxes (which represent different To Do lists) is by using the different Superstars available in Gmail. Instead of having to label each message (time consuming!) I differentiate them by the color and star style I easily attach to a message. For example, the ‘red-bang’ star indicates a super urgent task. My Yellow star indicates a work-related task and the blue star represents my personal task list .
6. You can stick to your own system though, whatever works for you will be fine. For example, you can filter messages into different inboxes/task lists by label (Label:”the label you choose”) or by read/unread status (is:unread). Here is how I organized my task lists within Gmail:

Although I selected to show 5 messages in the inbox panes, the number you show completely up to you. In order for you to see the results in one picture, sort of, I selected only 2 messages per inbox to take a screen show of the result of these changes to my settings. Here it is:

You can see the different inboxes are stacked on top of each other in order of importance. You can also list them next to your regular inbox, if you prefer. When a task is completed, I simply un-star it to remove it from the to do lists.

I’m curious to see if any other people use multiple inboxes to create a task manager within Gmail, let us know in the comments! Also, at the risk of stating the obvious: you can email yourself with additional tasks you need to complete that are not in an email you received! I, for example, add a shopping list to my personal to-do inbox by emailing it to myself.