Taskforce is a Gmail extension that convert your emails into tasks and allows you to manage your tasks right within your inbox. It’s a handy tool to help you stay organized and save you time from toggling between different tabs and sites/applications. To enable Taskforce, you have to do the following:

  1. Go to the Taskforce website and login with your Gmail address. 2. Grant it permission to access your inbox. 3. Install the extension for your browser (Firefox, Chrome and Safari). 4. Login (if you have already logged in, reload the page) to your Gmail. You should now see the Taskforce bar right below your “sign out” links.

At any point of time, you can click the “+” button to add a new task. There are two fields available, one for the task name and the other for task description.

When reading a mail, you will see two buttons below the Title – Convert to New Task and Add to Existing Task.

Clicking on the Convert to New Task button will bring up the “Add new task” panel with the email title as the task name. There is also an option to add the email sender as the collaborator. When you have added a task, you can click on the “Tasks” button to check out your list of to-do. From here, you can then edit the nature of the tasks. You can either add collaborators, due date, delay date, comments, or to delete the task. The delay date is one interesting feature that allows you to push back a task to a later date. When the date arrives, it will then be pushed back to the current tasks folder.

After trying out Taskforce, I admit that I have taken a liking for it. I have tried several other task management apps like Google Tasks, Remember the Milk and Toodledo. They are either too simple and without any feature or too complicated for a casual user. Taskforce has just the right mix. One thing though, there is no mobile version yet, which means if you always check your email on the move (like me), you won’t be able to make use of this service. Other than that, if you are always checking your Gmail, or better still, keep your Gmail opens all the time, Taskforce could just be the right app for you.