Email is not broken, we are.

Does anyone else feel that e-mail is not broken, but task/project management systems are?

Fundamentally, doing "productive work" boils down multiple individual tasks which some humans are doing, while at the same time referencing and updating some store of information/documentation/metadata to find what to do, and say when/how it's been done. Computers should be great at assisting with this administration - the bicycle of the mind helps get you where you want to go.

The fact that email is used to move tasks between people, as the place to create new tasks, as the place to discuss tasks, as the default todo-list for a day unless you go out of your way to move information elsewhere, is all not a failing of email or behaviour, it's a failing of project management and shared todo list and documentation systems. They don't do it, so email does.

If you had a place where that kind of stuff was tracked /well/ it would be trivial to use it to do all this stuff and email would fall by the wayside because it would be less good. Email would become for personal, direct contact, and notifications of things that you request be sent to you.

Too much work should not build up in individual inboxes, it should build up in shared project management system - and a company can then choose to allocate more people to it. Asking one person for information because it isn't documented and searchable should not be the norm. Asking one person what needs to happen next because it isn't tracked shouldn't be normal. Emailing prototypes to your colleagues because there is no centralised storage that works nicely shouldn't be the default.

It even seems tantalisingly easy to build - tree structured projects with nested tasks, granular user permissions, a designed UI to answer questions like "which bits need work", "which bits need questions answering", "which bits are underplanned", "what should I be doing". Templates of procedures so you can set regular patterned actions in motion.

It sort of exists. It's sort of in CRM and Sharepoint workflows, it's sort of in individual task lists, it's sort of being made real. But not yet.

Normal cars are no good at moving lots of goods. The way to fix that is not to make family cars with reinforced axles and tractor tyres, and it's not to teach people to drive slower so they can balance things more carefully. It's to invent vans and trucks and trains.

I don't think many of us on HN want to use email as a ToDo list, but there are other people that we work for or with that tend to use email in this way. For example, my father is a fortune-500-exec-type (and an engineer), and he can't seem to grasp the idea of using a unique subject line (this led me to tell him, "don't email, just call"). There are also people that use the "email this article" function to share articles with you; I immediately delete such emails (I don't do html email), and let them know, but they persist. The issue reminds me of thread-jacking on forums leading to the idea that "forum software is broken."

In other words, there are a myriad of poor choices being made by people that either cause security issues, or inefficiencies using email as a medium that is suboptimal.

I agree with the sentiment of what (I think) you're trying to get at.

However, the problem that some people have raised is that there are many different task management/project management systems out there, and clients interfacing with multiple technology suppliers may not want to learn all of them. Email has one (simple) interface that you can use to delegate tasks to all your suppliers regardless of what management software they use. Furthermore, the client creating the task may not be able to describe it to the same extent that an engineer needs, or know enough to fill out all the meta data required.

To this end, they send their task via email to the engineer (or project manager) and this person enters it into their company's management tool, transmuting it into the appropriate technical specs/jargon at this point.

This may seem like an "extra step", but there are tools for Outlook/gmail to create tasks in popular task management software such as JIRA or Basecamp. Furthermore, someone will likely still have to clean the data up to make it engineer friendly, and assign it to someone. As long as this has to be done, it doesnt seem like copying/pasting an email into a task description is really that much extra work.

Thanks for the grounding aethr. And toast76 brings up very good points. What I think we've seen recently with all the related articles on HN is a dichotomy of how we are viewing the problem. Most describe it from the perspective of email not fulfilling our technical needs (security, threading, etc.) which is true. There is a lot of work to be done there. I just want to help shed light on a broader problem, where we're shoehorning email into a very difficult problem that is brought on heavily by our own actions.

It's 2012. We have servers/services on which we can post files/attachments, either encrypted or access-controlled, and email links to those documents.