Todos with comments

When Mailmanagr first launched, todo lists in Basecamp were pretty basic.  You could create todos, assign them to someone and re-order them in lists.  We supported being able to create them and assign them to people right off the bat.

37signals has since introduced, what we think, is a really great enhancement to todos: you can now comment on them.  This new feature was just itching for support in Mailmanagr, and here’s why:

We get a lot of requests from clients over e-mail.  Some clients just don’t like to use a web-based product; they’re more comfortable getting in touch with you directly.  This was one of the major pain points we felt when we created Mailmanagr for ourselves.  Pre-todo comments, we could forward requests from clients as messages, and then add in a todo.  That just didn’t feel right though, when a client asks you to do something it should be a todo, not a message.

Now, when a client sends in a request, we just forward it along to Basecamp.  The subject of the message becomes the todo, and the body of the message is added as a comment.  Any attached files are included as well.  You can still assign the message and the person making the request has their contact info included as well.  Makes keeping track of things pretty easy, and has managed to get me to Inbox zero for the first time in a long time.

Here are a few articles to get you started with using Mailmanagr.