Almost all of my incoming tasks for work come via email. As much as I love an online collaborative task management tool, I just can’t get away from emailed tasks. So a few years ago, I decided to embrace the emailed task. I used some automation, and now, tasks I receive via email have the highest success rate of any work-related task.

Email Rules

I wrote extensively in this post about how and why I create so many email rules. Email rules are the single biggest productivity tool that most knowledge workers are not using. Please read my Sanity Saving Email Rules post before you install the macros below.

Action Item Vs. Tasks Post

I also have another post about the hierarchy of tasks in OmniFocus. This helps explain why I have a macro for moving email to OmniFocus and another macro for graduating an emailed task into an emailed project.

Video

Here is my video describing the two Keyboard Maestro macros I use to manage emailed tasks:

Macro Download

Here are the two macros I demonstrated in the video. They both use Karabiner-Elements to create a hyper key. This is why I say that I use the caps lock key as part of the trigger for the macros, but you can see in Keyboard Maestro that it’s all the modifier keys. Karabiner-Elements allows you to remap the caps lock key to all the modifier keys.