Email as a dashboard

I just discovered Producteev (via Brett Schulte), a task management service that seems to offer real group collaboration tools. It’s a really promising service that allows us to save and assign tasks to various members within a group, a feature that is notably missing from some of the best productivity software out there like Things and OmniFocus.

One of the things that jumps out at me from Producteev is that it can be operated almost completely from a dashboard I am perfectly familiar with already: my inbox.

When I get an email that I need to turn into a task, either for myself or for someone else, I can simply forward it to producteev with a deadline date in the email subject line. In reply, I get a confirmation mail containing another series of actions I can take:

Cool Tips: by replying to this email you can accomplish the following different actions
- Complete the task by replying done.
- Assign priority with a number of stars (*** or 3* will give the task three stars).
- Assign the task to a colleague @michael lewis (or @ml, @michael, @lewis).
- Label the task like this ##marketing.
- Modify the deadline with : tomorrow, today, next week, 09/27…
- Add a note to the task by replying “this is my note” (use quotes).
- Move the task to another workspace with #NewWorkspaceName.

This kind of “command line” integration into email is extremely useful for all kinds of reasons, and Producteev is not the only, or even the first, to offer it. Disqus, the comment system that you see on this blog, has for a long time provided moderation features (reply with “Delete” or “Spam” to comment notifications) via e-mail. One of the big differentiating ideas behind the creation of Posterous was that you made your bog posts in your e-mail client.

Many of us spend a lot of time in our e-mail interface, and it turns out that there’s a whole lot of flexibility in what you can do with e-mail, especially if you can start to interpret email responses in natural-language ways, the way scheduling apps have started to interpret appointment and reminder inputs.

With hosting services like Heroku offering integration on incoming e-mail services, processing incoming e-mail in your web app is going to become more and more straightforward, and more of a no-brainer.

Why try to twist people’s arms and re-invent an interface problem when you can stand on the shoulders of one of the most optimized computer interfaces in existence?

I am excited about e-mail as a dashboard, and I’m looking forward to seeing what other clever ways people will find to build services I need into a workflow I already have.