Every Single Email Client (That I Know Of) Is Completely Broken and Here’s Why
scottporad.com
scottporad.com
You know what your Inbox is? It’s inbound messages. Just like voice mail or snail mail or smoke signals.
As someone has commented on the blog itself, it's not like your Telephone voicemail system is a task list!
If he is sitting all day staring at his inbox rather than shock switching windows between his task tracker or work or whatever, and his e-mail interface, then that doesn't make every email client broken.
Of course, the author's idea that email is isomorphic to a todo list is pretty ludicrous.
My inbox is as someone much smarter than me said "A todo list others write for you". The problem is that they often have valid points, and I do indeed need to do the tasks outlined in the mail. I would pay serious money for a tool that helped me move tasks out of mail into my todo list in a sane fashion. As it is the act of managing todo's inbound from my mail is a major % of my work day. And that seems crazy.
For instance, I manage my tasks using OmniFocus, and in Apple's Mail program, pressing a keyboard shortcut instantly creates a task in OmniFocus, with the content of the email added as an attachment to the todo, and a link back to the original message (just in case I want to refer to the whole thread or something).
Another keyboard shortcut moves the message to my "Old Mail" folder on my IMAP server. (I used to organize old mail by client or project or whatever, but modern searching makes that unnecessary.)
I use two separate actions because the normal thing I do with a message is glance at it and put it in Old Mail. If I need to make a task out of it, it's one extra keystroke.
So my Inbox only has new messages in it that I haven't seen yet, and my task list has all my tasks, including the ones originating from email, without much friction.