This is the first in a series of profiles of Y Combinator Winter 2011 (YC W11) startups.
E-mail: it’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s become the central tool for business and personal communication, yet for exactly that reason it gets more and more difficult every year to keep up with the growing number of messages in our inboxes. If you believe time management gurus like David Allen, responding to those messages promptly and getting them off your plate is crucial to personal productivity. Yet, speaking for myself, I get so much e-mail that I could (and some days do) spend half of my work time just battling my inbox.
One of the startups emerging from the winter session of the Y Combinator venture incubator in Mountain View, CA, is tackling this problem. It’s called Taskforce, and it’s built a Web browser add-on for users of Google’s Gmail that makes it very easy to convert e-mail messages into tasks on a list. (By the way, this is going to be Y Combinator week at Xconomy San Francisco. Taskforce is one of 45 startups that will be making their pitches to investors this week at the incubator’s Demo Day presentations; I’ll have a Demo Day summary debrief on Thursday, and meanwhile I’m working on longer feature stories about five “YC W11” companies.)
Longtime readers of my articles know that I’ve spent years searching for the perfect combination of e-mail management and to-do list tools. After using Taskforce for a couple of weeks, I have to say that this one gets closer than anything else I’ve tried—though the danger, as with any system like this, is that you simply wind up with a ridiculously long to-do list in place of your ridiculously overfull e-mail inbox. More on that in a moment.
Beyond just helping you turn e-mails into tasks, Taskforce has an important collaboration feature, as well as a calendar for hiding some tasks until they actually need to be done. And more features are on the way, according to Taskforce co-founder Niccolo Pantucci. But its main function is to help you empty out your inbox by getting the critical action-oriented items onto a checklist. Which is pretty useful, because, let’s face it, most e-mails boil down to a request from somebody else that you do something.
Pantucci says he came up with the idea for Taskforce while he was stranded in the UK last April by the air-traffic-disrupting Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland. At the time, he was working for a San Francisco online video ad company called LiveRail. “I was trying to work from London, and I started to realize that I’m using Salesforce, I’m using Basecamp, and I’m using my inbox as a to-do list, and I’m logging into three or four different places all the time,” Pantucci says. “It wasn’t working for me. I thought, ‘You know what, there is probably a new way to do this. A data aggregator or editor that sits next to your inbox and extracts all the important things and turns it into something useful.”
Once you’ve installed the Taskforce add-on—which is free, and works on the Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and RockMelt browsers—the app shows up as a small blue bar in a patch of unused screen real-estate near the top of the Gmail window. The bar expands when you click on it to show your pending tasks. You can create tasks directly from the Taskforce widget, but the app’s real smarts—the data extraction part that Pantucci mentions—are apparent when you’re faced with a new incoming e-mail. When you open an individual message, the app inserts a button above the message body labeled “Convert to New Task.” If you click it, the app creates a new to-do item on your task list, using the email header as the suggested text (though you can edit this); at the same time, it gives you the option of
