Using ToodleDo: A Nifty Way to Convert E-mails to Tasks for Follow-ups

July 11, 2011

As you may know, I recommend using ToodleDo for tasks if you cannot use Windows Outlook for tasks.

One thing great about ToodleDo is that it has an easy way to convert e-mails to tasks from any e-mail system (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.), and I wrote about that in an earlier post. Briefly, you just forward the e-mail to a special ToodleDo e-mail address, and it gets inserted into your task list.

Well, here’s a nifty way to use that feature for creating Follow-up Tasks in ToodleDo.

First of all, Follow-up Tasks are tasks that you set in your own task list, hidden until a future date, to remind you to follow-up on something you are waiting for (see page 142 of the 3^rd edition of my Outlook book, or page 94 of Master Your Workday Now, for more about Follow-up Tasks).

One form of a follow-up task that I write and teach about is one you create from an e-mail request you send. Here’s how that works. Often people do not respond to your important e-mail requests and that can cause problems later; you often forget you are waiting and then your own deadline comes and you do not have what you need. So it makes sense to set a follow-up task to yourself to check after a certain number of days—to see if you got a response—and re-contact the recipient if you did not. So I teach this: just after sending such an e-mail, go into the Sent Items folder and convert the e-mail to a future-dated follow-up task. That way, a week later when you see the follow-up task, you have the e-mail context right at hand. This technique works both for Outlook Tasks and ToodleDo tasks (see the Outlook pages above for more details on this technique in Outlook).

But ToodleDo has a nifty, easier way to do that—one I have not mentioned anywhere yet. It’s this:

In ToodleDo, you just place the special ToodleDo e-mail address in the BCC box of original e-mail; nothing else—a follow-up task is created when you send the mail! You avoid the trip to the sent items folder. This is a great time saver and one you may do often since it is so easy.

One catch on that is this: you’ll need to get creative when setting the subject line, since the recipient will see any date or !! coding you put in there. So you might write a subject line like:

“Looking forward to the Quarterly Sales Report, thanks !! Needed before >7/29/2011”

That will cause a high priority task to show up in ToodleDo on July 29 (see my article linked at the beginning of this post for more details of how the !! and date subject-line coding works).

Being able to do this is another advantage of ToodleDo over Outlook tasks, so give it a try.

Michael