In case you haven’t noticed, Gmail rolled out to the to-do’s today. This is one of the most useful features to be added in my opinion. I live my tasks through Remember the Milk’s excellent addon, but it was painful logging in every time, synchronising the tasks, so this comes as a blessing. I have put together a small explanation on how-to use the to do list.

The first thing is to enable this through gmail labs. That’s done by clicking on the green bottle list on the top right.

click the green thing

Once you have done that, the first option is to enable tasks. There’s a bit of a mumbo jumbo written as tips, but once you read this, it should make more sense (and i have added it at the end anyway). Once you have tasks enabled, gmail will reboot itself (refresh) and you should have it enabled.

It will show up on your left below contacts.

Once you click on it, it opens up like the chat on your right lower bar.

Step 1 – Adding tasks
This is pretty simple, just start typing it in and you should see that tasks are auto completed.

Step 2 – Ordering Task lists
You might want to name the tasks according to personal/work/learning etc whatever you choose and to do that is easy. Once you have added the tasks then there is a button that looks like the bullet column on the right bottom (first from right), click on it and you should have this option show up.

As you can see with this option you can choose to name what the lists should be called.  That is an example of a list called To-Learn that I created. The other options are Rename the list, Delete the list and Refresh (which I don’t really see that much of a need). To switch between lists is to find the one you want to edit in the various lists and click on it.

Step 3- Email tasks to be added to list.
This is one of the best features that RTM is famous for, by adding an email to a task it places a “related email” option on the task list, you just have to click the related email under task to be directly taken to the email. For example.

I had an email with some CSS links that I wanted to read up, so I choose my current list to be “To Learn” (this is important, current list should be the one you want it to be added to) and then I choose the drop down from the “more actions” under email as shown below.

This automatically creates a task in the list that you have chosen and shows up as a “related email” link like shown below.

That should help you keep track of all the emails you need to send out to people or reply to as well.

Step 4 – Use hotkeys coz u is the cool
There are loads of hotkeys that can be used with the To-Do lists here and the main ones are shown below.

Tab- Indent (lets you create sub tasks or literally add a tab in the task list)
Shift-Tab – UnIndent (if you created a subtask it pushes it back to the left to make it a main task)
Ctrl+Up – Moves tasks up assigning priorities
Ctrl+Down – Moves tasks down assigning priorities
Shift+enter – Edit the details of the task (I personally prefer just clicking on it and changing..)

There are other options as well for you to choose from you can check the task and choose to clear it, remove it, delete it etc. You can also see which tasks are completed and choose to clear them as well. These are pretty simple things which I am sure you must have figured out already.

This is a sexy addition and by far my most favourite lab feature. Thank you Gmail!

[Update]- Here’s the official page on how to use tasks by gmail. Google Blogoscoped writes more about tasks here as well.

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