Brainwave time : comments welcome while this is in concept phase

I am in the middle of a project right now that has quite a few external users sending documents and instructions to me. The problem is that they are posting everything as messages and not assigning tasks to anyone.

This makes things extremely hard to process and delegate. This made me think back to a few Feature Requests from people that requested we add a feature to create a task from a message. At the time I thought they were crazy! Why would you want to do that? Now I understand....

It's early days and the idea is only slowly forming in my mind so I'd appreciate your comments on the best way to implement this.

These are my current thoughts:
  • You go into the messages section and view the message that was written
  • A button is somewhere on the interface Create Task from this Message (Obviously shorter....)
  • Clicking this button now needs to do the following:
    • Create the task - We could use the Subject of the message as the task name
    • Description : I don't like the idea of putting the body of the message as the task description as some messages are verbal diarrhea
    • Comments : This may be better. Add comments to the task from the message (A message could have some replies)
    • Files : Any files will be linked to the task
    • Assigned to : Pick from a list (or multiple people)
    • Due Date : Pick a date (or not)
    • Task List : Pick from a list of existing task lists
So, the above seems fine and do-able. The next bit is tricky, what do we do with the existing message? In an ideal world, we would have the ability to archive the message.

Most of the time the problem is that the person added a message when in fact they meant a task so it may be Ok to delete the message once the task is created. OR We link the task to the message.....not sure yet which is the best way. Linking a task to a message would be more work for us and complicate things a bit....(remember, we have to now think of the API so extra functionality needs to be approached carefully)

Do you think this feature would be useful? Would you use it? Let us know in the comments.....

Dan.
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9 responses
I like where this is headed, as currently no one uses the message tools and have not found a way to implement this feature. However we have started to use the comments section of the task quite often but if there was a way to replace the comments with the message function that would be a more dynamic communication tool... Not sure if my verbal diarrhea makes any sense but keep up the good work...
— costelcoca
We also never use the Message feature since most people can't let go of email. For example, meeting minutes are sent by email (even though Messages or Notebooks would probably be a better place to store/manage). Minutes generally contain multiple action items which a project admin needs to manually convert to Tasks. So the workflow that Dan described above could work. But maybe instead of turning an entire message into a task, it would be helpful to just have the ability to create a task while viewing a message. The key here is that we’d need to be able to copy text from the Message while accessing the Task creation feature. For example, in my meeting minutes example:
1) I scan for the action items
2) Click a button to create a task
3) Copy/paste relevant text from the message into the Task name/subject
4) Fill out the rest of the fields (description, comments, due date, etc) - again, copy/paste from the message as needed
5) Repeat until all the tasks have been created.

After that, I personally don’t have any need to archive or link the message. I can delete the message if it serves no purpose anymore. Or leave it for historical reference.

A much more useful feature for us would be an email drop box that automatically creates a Message or Notebook from the email (automatically linking any email attachments to Files tab would be a great feature, too). But this feature involves a completely different set functions/workflow…

— Andy
I agree that a typical message would likely contain several tasks in paragraph form. Depending on how clear and organized the message poster is it could take some effort to sort out what the tasks really are!

An ability to create multiple tasks from a single messages seems like the right thing to do.

— Mark
Email is a very personal thing; I work with people who will write no more than two lines in each message, others who write no less than three 200-word paragraphs and still others who may reply to an irrelevant message just to save typing my address --the latter are fortunately very few. I would gladly use the 'msg2tsk' function (how's that for a name?) but I expect that editing would often be required in any case. My 2c:
(a) Subject to task and body to description are intuitive enough; as a user that's what I would expect as a starting point.
(b) Linking messages to tasks is something that in my view you should consider regardless of the msg2tsk functionality; it would entail some kind of tagging/filtering function in the message section. In the long term I believe it could be one of the most useful weapons against message overload; after all, much of the messaging done will focus on particular tasks anyway, no?
— Alexander Deliyannis
I like the idea. If you leave the message though, there will be confusion when people refuse to move commentary to the task. My vote, without thinking too much about this, would be to keep both, but, have a link in either pointing at the other.
— Rick Cogley
The button is a very good idea. I would leave the message in a close format just for reference. Dont think you need to link the two.
— Sean Ware
yes, I LOVE it!! And I would recommend linking the task to the message, preserving the original message in it's original context. For us, we don't let client add or even see our tasks. Our tasks are very focused and come from the top. We don't want our team working on a task made by a client.

It might be nice that when a comment or message is made into a task, there is some indicator back on the message that shows to the client saying something like "A task has been made and assigned to... for this message" - When the task is closed, this message might be updated accordingly saying task complete. Again, our clients ONLY see the messages tab when they log in, so anything that can be automatically communicated to them is great.

Nice work guys, you guys are putting your efforts into the right places.

Jason

— Jason Morgan
I'm not too familiar with the app you're talking about, but it sounds like linking the task to the original message is probably the best route to go.

From a user-experience perspective, you may want to make it so if you highlight text within the message and click the Create Task button, the highlighted text populates the comment of the task.

— disenhower
This would be HUGE for us. We work with task based requests from clients (primarily via email). So, if you could integrate the "email to message" function, and then the "create task from message" this would be a great, great move.

Great work, as always, Dan!

— Daniel Dahlen