Turning Email into Tasks

A lot of people have a love-hate relationship with their email. You have to live with it, and you certainly can’t live without it. It’s both the bane of our information-stuffed lives and the best way to asynchronously communicate with each other using long form text¹. As a small business owner, I don’t receive too much email on any given day, and since I like a clean inbox, I try to respond and archive them as soon as possible.

This was not the case when I worked at a startup a few years ago. I was leading three teams and had to manage two separate email inboxes, totalling to around 250 emails a day. It was exhausting! Trying to maintain a zero-inbox was next to impossible.

The problem with email inboxes is the absolute lack of context when you are looking at a list with no idea of what the body of the email contains. Not everyone has the discipline to name their subjects descriptively, and as a result, I’d have to click in and out of hundreds of emails every day creating a sort of email-PTSD, the effects of which I still feel today when I look at the Gmail interface.

Some people are comfortable with this. They seem to have no problems with treating their email inbox as a to-do list. They efficiently search their inboxes and don’t ever seem to clean it out. I find this impossible. The lack of order drives me nuts!

Which is why I like to create a task in my task manager and link the email to it. This way, I know which emails contain tasks that I need to act on, versus which ones are simply information updates (and which ones are useless blather that I can delete right away.)

I also prefer email clients on my desktop as opposed to web mail interfaces like Gmail, and can’t think of any good reason why one is better than the other – so I assume it’s because I’m old-fashioned. I’ve used email clients for close to three decades now, and still prefer them over using a web browser to check my email.

If I need to attach an email link to a task from the browser, say from Gmail, it’s as simple as copying the URL and pasting it into the task manager. Doing this with an email client, on the other hand, is not so straightforward. Usually a plugin needs to be installed.

The Thunderbird interface. Not mine though. The image is from here.

For many years, my email client of choice was the venerable Thunderbird², and I used a plugin called Thunderlink that could do this. That plugin stopped working some years ago, but by then I had switched to an email client called MU4E within Emacs, which made this process even easier. I love using plaintext for email³, because it’s so clean and straightforward⁴. When I’m reading my emails, I can call up a capture mechanism when I spot something that needs some action, and it creates a task, with a link to the email. I love this seamless integration between my calendar, notes, task manager, and email, and wonder why software developers don’t offer this by default.

• The top half of this screen is my to-do list, and the bottom half is my email. Both are in emacs (I’ve just split the window into two.) I scroll through my email, pick one and call up the capture mechanism.
• This automatically creates a task in my to-do list, filled out with the name of the person and the action I need to take i.e, respond to the email.
• The task is linked to the email, so when I open the task later, I can just click through to the right email I need to respond to. Even better, I can write the response right within my to-do list and turn it into an email response.

I mean, Gmail has something like this. It offers to create tasks which it adds to a rather anemic to-do list which in my opinion is good enough for a grocery list and not much more. It also integrates email to Google Docs, which is nice, but all this involves juggling many tabs on the browser which is icky, and also a great source of distraction. It’s easy for me to switch to some interesting website and lose all context to what I was doing in the first place.

Anyway, the point of all this background information is that during a recent OS reinstall, I somehow broke the MU4E configuration⁵ on my desktop, and now I can’t read email in Emacs. I’ve asked for help on their Github page, and in the meanwhile I still need to capture emails as tasks.

I still keep Thunderbird around and updated because MU4E is best for plain text emails and not so great with HTML stuffed with graphics. I looked around for ways to create links to emails in Thunderbird, and imagine my joy when I discovered that someone had revived the old Thunderlink plugin – now called CBThunderlink.

Long story short, I can now link emails to tasks using Thunderbird again, and for good measure, I also found a way to add those links to org-mode, my task manager in Emacs using a snippet of code I found here.

I’m a happy camper again.

Notes