Indus Khaitan of The Morpheus sent me an interesting post on “How we waste time on email”.

The inbox, used appropriately, can be one of the most successful productivity tools of all time.  For most of us, however, it ends up being a huge time sink.

Yes, true!

We found there were a number of deadly pains of email, but probably the biggest one was trying to keep track of complex interdependent tasks where you have to contact other people and involve them in a network of obligations…

Yes, yes, yes.

One of the reasons such “networks of obligations” are so taxing, Bellotti says, is that crucial information may be in any one of the replies, and it’s difficult for the recipient to remember just where. Thus, copious amounts of time are spent scrolling through the thread looking for that critical project deadline or contact number. She estimates that about 20% of the time in email “is spent either organizing stuff of trying to find stuff.”

A messaging system (a.k.a email) that used to be a one on one tool has been transformed into a tool that project managers and teams love. True, it is easy to email tasks and project messages around but as the complexity increases, so will the frustration of finding things. They say time is money.

This was the whole point we created DeskAway and our one line pitch is still the same:

DeskAway is a tool to overcome the limitations of email and spreadsheet-based collaboration by helping teams organize, manage, and track their work from a central location.

Check out the article here.

The reason we started DeskAway was to overcome the limitations of email and spreadsheet-based collaboration when working in teams. Email was never meant for collaboration. It is fantastic for a one to one tool but quite easily breaks down when you start to work with more people. Why not create something simple, powerful yet smart? That is the question we asked back in 2006-07.

Today, we see more and more people take to the web. That is a good thing! Going forward what will work is collaboration systems or online ’social’ software that gives you a central location (think your social network) to collaborate and track your work with your colleagues. The knowledge will not be stored within your inbox but on this central system that can be tapped by any one of your collaborators. This is where collaboration and project management software is moving towards - definitely out of your inbox.

It was great to read our vision nicely laid out in the recent story on Mashable - A World Without Email - One Man’s Vision of a Social Workplace.

Email is the most successful and popular application ever. We all rely on getting our information, updates and notifications through email whether it is on our PC, Mac, Blackberry or iPhone. We understand that email is not going anywhere and so have built certain tools within DeskAway that will help you collaborate right from your inbox.

1. Every action in DeskAway has an email notification - so if I am assigning you a task or an issue, you will get an email with all the information and a link to view it within the application.

2. Then there is DeskMail - with this, people can simply reply to the emails they get in #1 (so they are working in their inbox now) but a copy of their email reply is also stored within their DeskAway project. So, if you reply to Jay’s email with comments, not only Jay will receive your comment via email but our application will start appending this email conversation as a comment thread within the task that can be visited later. Sending attachments is also possible. Think Posterous or tumblr here.

3. If you set it on, you and your team members can also get a daily email reminder (so, you don’t have to log in to the application) of all your pending and upcoming projects, milestones, tasks and issues.

There are a few companies that have moved away from email for collaboration, but if you love your inbox you can take advantage of the above when working on your projects.

SuperChooha is a social media agency based here in Mumbai. They have recently been using our software. Just got this from…

Good to see this! Thanks Superchooha team

This was one of the most widely requested feature in the last 6 months and we are finally bringing it to you by the name of DeskMail!

DeskMail is a service by DeskAway that helps you communicate with your projects via email. DeskMail will allow you and your team to add tasks and reply to task comments via email. If you are using email on your smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry etc.) you can easily email out tasks to your team members (just like you would normally) and still have a copy of it stored on your DeskAway account. When people reply to those tasks (by sending you an email), new comments are added to the task on DeskAway and the entire communication thread can be tracked within your projects.

In a nutshell, this is how it works…

What really led us to designing DeskMail?

We observed that email is still very very popular for task delegation and project communication (especially on smartphones with email support). People were adding tasks from DeskAway but were using email to comment and update others. Hence, the communication was broken up into 2 channels, DeskAway and email, making it hard for everyone to follow what was happening within a particular task. If the comment was sent via email, it was not stored on DeskAway and hence making it hard for the project manager to locate it. With the feedback we received, we decided to let people communicate with DeskAway via email aka DeskMail.

Why the name DeskMail?

We went through a series of names and even polled our followers on twitter. Keeping in mind future enhancements and features we decided to go with DeskMail - short and sweet, easy to pronounce and like the fact that the ‘away’ in DeskAway gets swapped with ‘mail’ (in this case, sending emails away to DeskAway).

Check out our help page for instructions on using DeskMail. In the coming months, we will be extending DeskMail to Issues and Messages as well. Thank you for your continued feedback and do keep them coming. Cheers!