Turn an email into a task without leaving your inbox
Forward it to tasks@maketimeflow.com and put your plan for it in the subject line. It arrives in your
@inboxwith the whole email attached as notes, ready to triage.
The one thing to know
Send or forward any email to tasks@maketimeflow.com — from the email address you use to log in to MakeTimeFlow.
That address is how we know it’s you. Mail from an address we don’t recognize bounces and no task is created, so if nothing shows up, check which account your mail client actually sent from. (Aliases and “send as” addresses count as different addresses.)
What arrives
| Part of the email | Becomes |
|---|---|
| Subject line | The task title — parsed with the Task Text Format |
| Body | The task notes |
| From, Reply-To, To, Cc, Date, Subject | A summary block at the top of the notes |
| All the other headers | Kept verbatim at the bottom of the notes, out of your way |
Two more things happen automatically:
- It lands in
@inbox. Email is untriaged by definition, so it waits for you rather than guessing. You’ll pick it up in your next going-well or shutdown ritual — unless you named a bucket yourself (see below). - It’s tagged
#emailin the title. There’s no separate tag field to hunt through; search#emailin any task search and you have everything that came in this way.
A blank subject creates nothing
The subject is the title, and a task needs a title. If you forward something with an empty subject, no task is created. Type at least a word or two.
Put your plan in the subject line
This is where it stops being a dumping ground. Everything in the Task Text Format works in the subject, so you can decide when, how long, and where at the moment you forward it — which is the only moment you actually have the context.
Reply to the board about the budget question @today 30m
Draft the vendor response @next 1h p1
This long hard task disguised as an email 1h start Monday
Conference notes to read @later
The most useful three:
| You want to say | Add to the subject | Example |
|---|---|---|
| When I’ll get to it | @today, @next, @later, @reference | @next |
| How long it’ll take | Xm, Xh | 45m, 2h |
| When I’ll start | start + a date phrase | start Wednesday, start tomorrow 2pm |
A bucket you name in the subject wins over the @inbox default. Everything else — priority (p1), the x-factor (x2), a parent project (/Launch) — works exactly as it does in quick add. The full list is in Task Text Format.
Timeblock it on the way past
Adding a duration and a start date is the difference between a task you’ve captured and a task that has time to happen in.
Review the contract 1h start Wednesday 2pmgives it an hour, on a day, on your calendar. See X-Blocks and Estimating Time.
The power move: stop starring hard emails
Some emails aren’t messages — they’re long or difficult tasks wearing a message as a disguise. Starring them, flagging them, or leaving them in the inbox is an anti-pattern: they become dread-anchors that stop you ever feeling your email is handled. You open your inbox, you see them, you close your inbox.
Flagging can’t sort by effort. Folders cost you time you didn’t have. The fix is to stop asking your email client to be a task system: get the hard ones out, into a system that knows what else you have on and how much time is left, and decide when — which is what a Task Trust System is for.
The rule of thumb: if it isn’t a quick reply, it isn’t email any more. Forward it, name the time, and let your inbox go back to being a stream of things passing through.
CC yourself into the loop
You can put tasks@maketimeflow.com in the Cc or Bcc field of an email you are sending. Because the message is from you, it creates a task the same way, with your outgoing message in the notes — a record of what you asked for and when.
For tracking whether the other person actually came back to you, pair it with a waiting-for: see Closing the Loop - From Done to Delivered, which is built for exactly the gap between “I sent it” and “it’s handled”.
Good to know
- Attachments aren’t carried across. The text of the email comes over; files stay in your mail client. If you need the attachment, keep the original mail and reference it.
- Plain text is preferred. If a message has both plain-text and HTML parts, we take the plain text, so the notes read the way the email did. HTML-only mail still works.
- Your line breaks survive, and text that looks like markup stays text.
- It’s one task, not a thread. Forwarding the same conversation twice makes two tasks.
Never forward patient or confidential email
Forwarding an email to MakeTimeFlow copies the whole message — body and headers — into your task notes. Keep clinical and patient communication inside your organization’s secure systems. This feature is for non-patient email only, and the same goes for anything under a confidentiality obligation: forward a task you write yourself (“reply to the referral request 30m @today”) rather than the message itself.
While you’re calming the chaos
Email capture is one move. These are the others that make the biggest difference, and none of them need a new tool:
- Batch it, and triage with time in mind. Processing email in blocks buys back focus time; a triage that knows how much time you actually have buys back more.
- Decide how much time you want to spend on email. Give it a communication block. Change the question from how much time did I spend? to how much time do I want to spend? — then use Communication Tools to open the whole group in one click and a timer to hold the edge. Email you haven’t blocked time for steals your deep work anyway, because your brain keeps worrying about it.
- Run an Important-and-Other filter. A VIP filter, or a replies-to-things-I-sent filter, will do most of the work of the paid tools without moving you into someone else’s interface.
- Sort by sender when you’re clearing in bulk. Most email can be dealt with fast, and same-sender runs are faster still. (How I process 1000 emails in an hour · video)
- Use a read-it-later service, guilt-free. Forward the interesting-but-not-now mail somewhere you’ll read it later, if ever. Without one, it sits in your inbox crowding out the work.
The two-minute rule has aged
“Under two minutes? Just do it” can eat hours at today’s volume — even David Allen warns against becoming a slave to two-minute actions. Deciding and replying quickly is a skill, and skills train. Get faster at the quick ones; forward the rest.
The long version of all of this is Relax and conquer email, the newsletter that introduced this feature — and the AI triage approach it builds on is Build your own Jarvis (video).
See Also
- Task Text Format — everything you can put in the subject line
- Task Trust System — why capture and retrieval are the whole game
- Let It Flow — capture what’s notable, decide what it is later
- Closing the Loop - From Done to Delivered — waiting-for and follow-ups
- Communication Tools — one-click access to where people reach you
- Estimating Time · X-Blocks — giving the task somewhere to happen