Who says email makes a bad to-do list? ...or a bad project management system?
Email is still the fastest way to delegate a task. It may not work quite as well as a project project management system or to-do list. But it's fast, it works, it's mobile and, hey, you were already in your email, so why not fire off that simple request.
The problem is that once you hit 'send', there is no way of tracking whether it gets done! Unless, of course, you enter it in your calendar, project management system, to-do list, or [insert overly-complex external system here].
Now, tracking email-delegated tasks can be done within seconds
Two Characters...
That's all you need to turn a followup into a 'task'.
It works like this:
To: employee@company.com
cc: 2days-t@followupthen.com
re: Get it done!
The magic lies in the -t part above. Adding this to the end of your date turns the followup into a task. The difference betwen a task and a followup is that the task has a due-date and includes the concept of getting done. If it does not get done before its due-date, we will keep following up daily until it is done.
How it Works
The moment the task has been assigned we send an email to you and the assignee with a link to mark it as "done" or cancel it.
Let's say your assignee clicks the "done" link before the task is due to (yay!). In this case, you get automatically notified that it's been done.
Let's say two days goes by (in the above example) and it's still not done (boo!). In this case, both you and your delinquent assignee get a friendly reminder about the task.
Day 3 goes by...it's still not done! You and your assignee will receive another reminder...day 4 another email reminder, day 5 another, etc.
Now this may seem like a lot of email, but either person can complete or cancel the task in any one of these emails (which notifies the other person).
To / Cc / Bcc Tasks
You can use the to/cc/bcc fields with tasks just as you can with normal followups:
Assign a task via the 'bcc' field and you will be the only one to get the followup. 'Cc', as mentioned above, follows up with another person, and, perhaps the most useful,
sending a followup directly to followupthen will assign the task to yourself : )
Of note is that we do not yet support recurring tasks, or assigning tasks to multiple people within one email, though are considering it based on what people want!
Try it out!
Schedule a task for yourself by emailing 1m-t@followupthen.com