How to Keep Track of Tasks That You Assign by Email [Best Practice]

Have you ever sent an email asking a coworker to schedule a meeting, or a document for review to your boss, but remind bothered whether he will remember to do that or just read your email and forget?

Here is how to handle these situations. whenever you send an important task by email and want to be peaceful minded about it getting done, you should gain back control by scheduling a reminder. here is how to do that:

Include yourself as a BCC (that is, add your email address in the BCC filed). That way, you’ll get a copy of the email without the other recipients knowing about it. Then,

Move that email from the inbox to your calendar. Save it as an event a few days later (enough time for the other person to complete the task).

Send a reminder – if the due day arrives and you haven’t got any reply, forward the email with a reminder.

Of course you can’t go through that process with all your emails, but for the important ones, It certainly worth the effort.

You can do that with Gmail or outlook

You can apply this method whether you’re using Gmail or Outlook.
Outlook users – to create the event, simply drag the email into the calendar folder.
Gmail users – to transform an email into an event, click “more actions” and then “create event”.

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Christoph Borer

Hi there. I'm using Rememberthemilk for GTD. I'd both send an email with a task to the recipient and would then create a "waiting for" item in the respective todo list in Rememberthemilk. I'd like to have a task management application that would allow me to automatically create a waiting for item while sending an email to the project member. I believe in email and would not like to ask task recipients to register with some online service to check webpages with their todo, because they won't do that.

I've tried to work with the email interface of RTM but didn't find this so handy: you would send an email i.e. to John Doe, putting the task in the subject line, and putting the RTM inbox-Email in the bcc, then have to start the email body with variables that define the list the task should be put on, the tags to use and the due date. But this results in an email that would start with cryptic signs at the start that is not so funny.

Anybody understanding what i'm looking for? perhaps a simple online ticketing system will do it? some good solutions around (free, reliable online service)?

@Hagoleshet

I'm going to try this: How to Keep Track of Tasks That You Assign by Email http://tinyurl.com/avfnen

Dmitri Eroshenko, Relenta

Here's how you do it in Relenta:

1. Click on "Create task" from email
2. Assign it to your colleague
3. Set a due date
4. Monitor its completion in the Agenda view

Benefits:

1. No email multiplication (don't we all have enough emails floating around already?!!)
2. The person responsible automatically sees the task in her agenda
3. When completed, no need to send more emails
4. The whole process is as hands-free as is humanely possible

Relenta puts an end to endless email hacks. Life is too short for that.

Eyal, don't get me wrong, this is a great hack for non-Relenta users. I really enjoy your blog. Thanks!

eyalsela

test

eyalsela

Thank Boaz,
actually, I used a similar method when I worked with outlook (nowadays I'm using Gmail).

Boaz Zemer

This is a great suggestion indeed.
At work, I used a similar method myself.
I didn't use the calendar for it thou. Here's what I did:

In Outlook*, you can set a due date for the mail to expire.
With a rule, I made all sent mails where my E-mail appears in the BCC field, to go to certain tasks folders I made (combined with a rule to specify which task folder to use according to certain key words in the Subject field), and then i could see expired mails turn red and forward them onward.

*:
In Outlook 2003 this is done via 'Options' in the mail itself.
In Outlook 2007 this is done with the 'Follow Up' button (red flag).