How to turn emails into tasks without living in your inbox

For many people, the inbox is the to-do list. Unread means “to do”, flagged means “really to do”, and anything that scrolls off the first screen is effectively gone. It sort of works until a busy week, when the important email from Tuesday is 140 messages down.

The fix is simple to describe: when an email contains a task, turn it into a task and get it out of the inbox. Here are ways to do that on Windows, from built-in to fast.

Option 1: flag in Outlook, see it in To Do

Flagged emails in Outlook appear in Microsoft To Do’s Flagged email list when the feature is turned on. It is free and built in. The weakness is that the task is still the email: the subject line is often not the action (“RE: RE: Q3 plan”), and there is no date unless you add one.

Tip: when you flag, also rename the task in To Do to the actual action: “Send Q3 plan comments to Dana”.

Option 2: drag to calendar or task

In classic Outlook, dragging an email to the Tasks or Calendar icon creates a task or appointment with the email’s content. Quick, but tied to Outlook. Microsoft’s own To Do help covers how flagged email and Outlook tasks connect.

Option 3: forward to your task app

Many task apps give you a private email address. Forward the message and it becomes a task. Good for tools you use on every device; it does add another copy of the email somewhere.

Option 4: write the task yourself

This is the one I recommend for most emails, because it forces the most important step: deciding what the action actually is.

1. Read the email.
2. Decide the next action and when.
3. Capture it in one line: “Reply to Dana with Q3 comments thursday”.
4. Archive the email.

With a global capture shortcut, step 3 takes a few seconds and you never leave the email. In Jot that is Ctrl + Shift + J, the line, and Ctrl + Enter. The date is read out of the line and becomes a reminder.

The email becomes reference. The task becomes the thing that comes back to you.

Should you link back to the email?

It helps if the task needs details from the email. Options: include a distinctive word from the subject so search finds it, or keep the email in a single “action support” folder until the task is done. Avoid leaving it in the inbox “so you can find it” - that is how the inbox becomes the list again.

Two-minute rule

If the email takes less than two minutes to deal with, deal with it now. Writing a task for a two-minute reply costs more than the reply. This is straight from David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

What to aim for

An inbox that contains only things you have not read yet, and a task list that contains everything you have to do. See GTD on Windows for the wider system, and a ten-minute weekly review for keeping both lists honest.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.