By Dr. Frederik Lindberg

Remember when you first started using email? If you were an early user (pre-1990) you were probably getting 5-10 emails a day and co-workers still picked up the phone or stopped by your office to ask you for something. It was fairly easy to manage your email inbox.

Now email has become a chore. What was once used strictly as a communications tool has now become the central place from which work is received, managed and delegated in organizations. So in addition to having more emails to deal with (the recent reported average is 200 emails a day), your email inbox is a storehouse of “to-dos”, “to-reads” and items of “indeterminate status.” The real problem for users and the companies they work for is that those important tasks are often getting missed because they get buried in the daily flood of emails and email programs alone do not have sufficient capability to effectively manage tasks.

Why Email is Not a Task Management Tool

When we made YuDoMail available to beta testers we uncovered seven specific issues that users experience with task management in email.

1. Tracking: Users find it difficult to keeping track of lots of concurrent actions: One’s own to-dos and to-dos one expects from others.

2. Prioritizing: Limited capability to mark things as important or outstanding amongst the less important items.

3. Managing: Email alone does not make it easy to manage activity extending over time or keep track of threads of activity and  discussions.

4. Monitoring: No way to monitor deadlines and reminders, which may be associated with particular messages or other content, and there is no closed-loop process.

5. Organizing: Difficult to collate related items (e.g., an extended thread) and associated files and links.

6. Reporting: A task oriented overview, at a glance, rather than scrolling around and inspecting folders, is non-existent.

7. Analyzing: No ability to view request volumes, outstanding requests and turnaround times at the individual and team level, as well as important metrics to show trends and support root cause analysis.

The exciting outcome for our beta testers is that they were able to overcome all of these issues using YuDoMail. For the first time teams had complete visibility into the request status, for themselves and for their team, to drive accountability and improve productivity. If you’re interested in giving YuDoMail a test drive, click here. If you’re already a YuDoMail users, we would love to hear your task management stories and tips.