Gmail Shows Signs of Becoming Your All-in-one Productivity Tool

Today Gmail team has announced addition of yet another feature in Gmail Labs: it’s called Tasks and is intended to do exactly what the name suggests - manage your tasks as your To-Do list integrated right into your email.

Of course you should not expect to find a full-featured solution as it is understandably limited to serving as a simple task manager that could help you manage your tasks from within the email application, like when you read an email and need to add a task to complete based on the information in the email. At that any email can be converted into a task - so that when you open the task you could easily see all the information needed to complete it in one convenient place.

The tasks are located in a separate gadget box same as the chat now is so they are visible to a user all the time, whatever the user is doing. For the window to appear and for you to be able to start using the functionality you will need to enable it in Labs first and start using the functionality by clicking the Tasks link right below your contacts link. But I agree with MG Siegler over at VentureBeat that locating the tasks box safely in the sidebar could be a much more convenient option instead of keeping the distracting window constantly open.

Of course your desire to use the Tasks feature in Gmail should depend on how much you trust Google and its various products overall as Marshall Kirkpatrick is referencing multiple user complaints about recent behavior of Gmail with downtimes and slow operation. But for those users who are more or less happy with Gmail (and I know the majority of Gmail users fall into this happy category) I think it is not really bad having the ability to manage some simple tasks right within the Gmail application - especially if you already have Gmail open most of the day.