Gmail Tasks Adds Email Sharing

Ever since it’s launch last year, Gmail Tasks has been gradually improving. Not only have there been improvements on the back-end to increase responsiveness, but we’ve seen some important feature additions, including:

• Mobile and Gadget interfaces
• More advanced methods for managing and editing tasks
• And Google Calendar integration

Tasks quickly became one of the most popular Gmail Labs projects and recently graduated from Labs at the head of it’s class. You may have noticed that new “Tasks” link right under “Contacts”  and above your Chat. It’s no longer necessary to activate Tasks via Labs.

The newest feature introduced to Tasks is the ability to share tasks via email. Although it’s not a very advanced or immediately useful feature on the surface, it can help you in a few ways. It also shows that Google is thinking ahead and possibly contemplating deeper integration between Tasks and Gmail itself.

Here are a few ways you can make the most of this new sharing feature:

• Email your grocery list to your phone (assuming you don’t have mobile internet)
• Delegate a project to someone. They would be able to see which tasks you’ve already completed.
• Provide a detailed progress report to your boss or a client
• Let your editor know what topics you’ll be covering on the blog for the week
• Share your birthday or xmas list with grandma

I could go on and on, but you get the point. If we’re talking about task sharing and delegation, this is definitely not on par with Remember The Milk or Manymoon. That’s to be expected at this early stage, though. I would definitely like to see Tasks improve to the point where sharing tasks is more than a simple email. It would also be cool to be able to add tasks via SMS or even email.

There are many people that swear by Google Tasks, but I’m still on the fence. As much as I’d like to have all my GTD and productivity needs met by one software suite, I think I’m going to stick with what I’ve got for now. What do you think?