Moo.do turns Gmail into a task management system
techcrunch.comThis looks pretty cool, but I have a philosophical hangup about my task list being in email. The problem is that ones email inbox is a place where other people decide what shows up there.
I realize that people have a lot of responsibilities in email, and for some people email may even be a majority of their job. I've definitely been in that position. But even if I am spending the majority of my time in Gmail, I still take a hard stance that my personal todos need to live outside of email lest I lose agency over my own priorities.
This sounds amazingly similar to the beginning of our post on Medium [1]. As you point out, email is only part of the whole picture. We're aiming to add the tools to organize email along with your personal/business todos without giving up that agency.
Snippet: "Would you use a todo list where all your tasks are created by someone else, and you can’t prioritize or rearrange them? Of course not — they’re your tasks, so you should be in control. Using a todo list sorted only by creation time would be incredibly frustrating. But that’s exactly what email is."
[1] https://medium.com/moo-do/were-making-email-a-powerful-todo-...
It really sounds like pg's suggestion to "replace email"[0].
I've never had (so far) any problem with managing my inbox, but since many can see the clear correlation between email <-> todo list, I'd say you're on to something.
Active Inbox [1] is also another great one I've used for years.
> This system is not for the faint-hearted or casual user, but rather for someone with an overwhelming inbox, a nearly unmanageable amount of tasks hidden in email messages, and the willingness to learn a new way of interacting with your productivity applications.
Hey, that's me!
Very interested in this, but only if access to my email stays on my local machine. If there are any cloud servers involved... nope.
It's client-side access to Gmail through the Gmail API. The only thing that uses our server is the Snooze feature, which only stores the thread ID and the date. And all the other data is stored in your Google Drive account which is only accessible client-side. We don't want to read your data.
If your email is already on Gmail isn't it already on cloud servers...?
The issue is that I trust Google more than I trust "random startup XYZ" with all of my email, which contains personal information, medical documents, financial statements, etc.
Two techniques I use.
Batch Process by Elimination. Google labels/tags + rotating stars + quicklinks is a powerful combination. Quicklinks can search for tag and star combinations. Tags represent substance, and stars represent state. So these lists can be batch processed based on tag + star, with the initial combination automatically set with filters. It helps when you can control email aliases to filter by recipient also.
Minimizing Moving Parts. No threads + a preview pane eliminates back and forth, and when starring or unstarring, the list doesn't remove the message or change it's position, so your frame of reference stays constant. After a bunch of items have been processed, the list updates/shrinks by clicking on refresh or the same quicklink.
It took a while to arrive at this setup, but afterwards it's been impossible to move back to any classic email program. Just visually digesting a constantly changing long list of emails and folders is a lot of work. And that's before you've even gotten started.
Todoist always let you put gmails as todo items. What does Moo.do have over Todoist (or at least different).
Intriguing, but....
Without Calendar integration, it's not even worth my trying, and 14 days is not enough of a trial to learn a new system.
Contact sync as a free feature? Yeah, OK, that's what it's worth to me.
Right now, I use GTD-style tags in my business account and rely almost entirely on my business calendar for scheduling.
Without Calendar integration, I ain't movin'!
What might interest me:
* In the Free plan, offer Calendar and one of either GTD or Kanban (I'll start with GTD), and sync with one email account.
* In a step-up plan, offer either the "other style" or multiple accounts.
* In another step-up, offer everything, including Contact integration.
Then I might be willing to try it. But as it is, while I am unhappy with my ToDo management and really want something that works across multiple systems, without Calendar I won't move.
I also agree with the extension of trial time to at least a month because the abuse potential is very very low. Also, when signing up for workflow related services, I sometimes take awhile to integrate its use, or I just forget about it -- making 30 days into 20 days.
That's a great point. We'll look into changing it to 30 days. Also, if you email us when your trial is running out we'll be happy to extend it for you.
Any ETA for office 365 compatibility?
This looks like exactly the email workflow I've dreamed of (and thought about starting to write countless times, so thank you for actually doing so)
We don't have an ETA for Office 365 support yet because we're focusing on getting the experience right first. But we get a lot of requests for that so it's definitely a high priority.
Great answer (not the one I wanted, but one I can respect). That said, can you offer a "notify me when office 365 is ready" link for those of us who'd love to use it but have no way to today?
What does this offer over and above inbox by gmail + google reminders?
I've used Inbox from Google since it launched and am now playing around with Moo.do.
Inbox sort of plays with the idea of building an organization tool on top of email. It focuses on emails being "done" or "not done", it lets you snooze emails to get to inbox zero, it lets you save links from the web as items in your inbox, and it lets you create reminders in your inbox that look like emails but aren't (streamlining the common action of emailing yourself some quick note).
Moo.do seems to take all of this further. Instead of just snoozing an email or letting it sit in your inbox, you can do several other things with it. You can create an outline and move the email into the outline as an action item, optionally assigning a due date as well. Or you can setup a kanban board like Trello and move the email to different columns. Moo.do will automatically derive an agenda from dates on your outline as well.
GTD and Kanban boards, as a single interface to manage tasks across different services
I've been using moo.do as my task management (and note taking) tool for about a year. It's fantastically stable and reliable, I would really recommend it to anyone.
I hear this product was built while the founder traveled to 20+ countries. Pretty cool.
This is awesome.