Musings on personal and enterprise technology (of potential interest to professional technoids and others)

Monday, February 2, 2009

Official Gmail Blog: Tasks Continue to Evolve ( + iPhone demo)

An interesting update to Google's Tasks, focusing helpful improvements to mobile access*: Official Gmail Blog: Tasks: Paper vs. iPhone

A major step was already announced on the Official Gmail Blog in December , which explained the simple and intuitive capability to copy a Gmail message to a Task .

Still apparently not mentioned, are the wishlist features I had suggested last year, namely:

Will Google Labs provide something analogous to Microsoft Office Tasks, including workflow, assignment, tracking, prioritizing, alerting etc.
?

In any case, it is nice to see Google working on the Tasks mobile interfaces, which are clearly critical for making it easy for users to ensure their Tasks are kept up to date. Easy maintenance of one's "todo list" of activities and tasks is a basic concept of the GTD philosophy (see e.g. David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity ).

**at least for iPhone and Android, though apparently not with the same full Task edit capability for other "xhtml-enabled" devices such as Windows Mobile... Here is Google's 46-second YouTube demo of the new iPhone Task interface, courtesy of the aforementioned Official Gmail Blog: