I’m a bit of a productivity nerd. I’m always looking for ways to optimize and organize my thoughts, ideas, tasks, projects, and communication, preferably in a digital workspace. One of the things most of us deal with daily is our incomingand outgoing emails. Some incoming emails need to be handled immediately, others can wait, and still others require a lot of research before they can be answered. So, it would be helpful if we could handle and process our emails in a more structured way. Thunderbird has long been my preferred email companion on Linux. But it wasn’t until I started looking more closely at Thunderbird’s built-in tasks functionality that I realized how powerful this email application can be for my productivity. Thunderbird’s Tasks functionality isn’t a super fancy and modern solution, like some others offer, for example, with behavior-based automation, smart shortcuts to speed up the organization process, or AI support for organizing and summarizing your emails to be answered. But Thunderbird does offer good and robust task functionality for organizing and completing your email tasks. In this article, I will show you how to use the Tasks feature in Thunderbird. I will explain what the feature offers, how to use it, how to integrate it with your calendars, and how to convert emails into specific tasks. 

Content of the article

1. Introduction
2. What does Thunderbird Tasks have to offer?
3. How to work with Tasks in Thunderbird
4. Set up Tasks according to GTD
5. Final words

Introduction

When you need to handle a daily high volume of incoming email, the challenge is to prioritize, process, and respond without feeling overwhelmed. One of the productivity methodologies I implemented in my daily life to make this possible is GTD, or Getting Things Done. GTD is a well-known and widely appreciated methodology of the productivity expert David Allen. He describes this generic productivity method in his best-selling book “Getting Things Done”, which you can find via the button below.

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According to David Allen, GTD is based on “Five clear steps that apply order to chaos”. David Allen explains in his book these five important steps that can help to set up and master your GTD system from idea to result. These steps are Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.

In my opinion, the above steps that lay the foundation for the GTD approach can be very nicely aligned with our email management. The core of GTD in relation to your email is that you strive to manage every item in your inbox, not in your head, but in a digitally organized system, so you get things out of your head. This helps you set the right priorities and handle tasks at the right time with the right attention. All of this helps you find peace of mind, knowing that with your system, you won’t miss anything.

The Capture step is primarily about collecting all your new potential tasks, in our case, new emails, in a clear location. In the case of email management, the Capture step is most of the time already partially or fully taken care of for you. With most email services, your new emails usually end up in your inbox automatically.

In the Clarify step, you think about the meaning and value of the emails in your Inbox. You need to determine if these emails are actionable or not. If an email is actionable, you need to decide what needs to be done to finish it. Is it a single task or is it a project related to multiple tasks? If it is not actionable, you need to determine if it can wait to be picked up later, if it can be delegated, if you want to archive the email for reference, or if the email has no value and can be trashed.

David Allen came up with the following set of questions to support the Clarify step:

Is the item actionable?

• NO
  • Is it trash?
  • Do I need to file it as a reference?
  • Do I need to add it to my Someday/Maybe list, calendar, etc?
• YES
  • What’s the next action?

Is the actionable item a do it now, delegate to someone else, or defer to do it myself later?

• If doing now, handle it in the moment, as long as it takes less than 2 minutes.
• If delegating, track it in a Waiting For folder.
• If deferring, track the action reminder in an Action folder.

If there are multiple actions involved to finalize the item, what’s the desired outcome?

• Track that outcome on your project manager.

Source: https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2017-Getting-Your-Inbox-to-Zero.pdf

After you’ve determined the corresponding action for each incoming email in the Clarify step, it’s time to Organize your emails. This requires a clear system that supports you in consistently performing your organizational activities. In Thunderbird, for example, you can use folders if the email needs to be saved for reference. But if these are actionable emails with a specific priority, Thunderbird’s Tasks functionality is your best friend. Here, you decide on priority, due dates, dependencies, and responsibilities.

The Reflect step is all about reviewing what you did, what you still need to do, what still has value, and what has lost its value over time. This Reflect step needs to be done frequently, preferably with smaller daily reviews and more in-depth weekly or bi-weekly reviews, so your productivity system keeps up-to-date and reliable. David Allen says that your inbox shouldn’t always be completely empty, but that you should aim to empty your inbox at specific times, which is in the review or reflect moments that you should plan at least once a week. I prefer to have my review moments every day and try to use the same workflow for processing and organizing.

The Engage step is all about actually doing the things you need to do. Here, you decide or make your system decide for you what you need to work on and when. If you have properly clarified and organized your emails according to GTD principles, it should now be clear which emails are actionable, which can be dealt with immediately or later, and what the priority is.

So, how can the Tasks functionality help us to handle and organize our emails in a GTD like approach? 

What does Thunderbird Tasks have to offer?

The Tasks feature in Thunderbird offers a clear and dependable way to bring structure to your daily workflow, whether you prefer gathering tasks directly from incoming emails or creating them entirely on your own. Thunderbird supports both Tasks and Events, each serving a different purpose while sharing the same calendar environment. Events are tied to specific points in time, meetings, birthdays, appointments, and appear as scheduled blocks in your calendar. Tasks, by contrast, focus on actions that need to be completed. They can include start dates, deadlines, priorities, and progress indicators, yet they do not standard set fixed time slots in your calendar (but you can enable showing tasks on your calendar). In that sense, Events represent commitments that happen at a set moment, while Tasks help you manage the work that moves forward at your own pace.

Turning an email into a task is both quick and intuitive, allowing you to capture responsibilities straight from your inbox and enrich them with reminders, notes, or priority levels. Creating tasks manually is just as flexible, giving you the freedom to plan ahead, break down larger projects, or track personal goals without relying on existing messages. Tasks can be categorized, re-prioritized, postponed, or updated as your plans evolve. And when your schedule shifts, Thunderbird even allows you to convert tasks into events, or events back into tasks.

Each task can include the following:

• Title
• Location
• Category
• Start and due dates and times
• Status
• Repeat option
• Reminder option
• Description
• Attachments
• Privacy selector
• Priority

How to work with Tasks in Thunderbird

Now that we know a bit better what Thunderbird Tasks has to offer, let’s find out how we can use the Tasks functionality to manage our actionable emails.

Opening the Tasks View

There are three main ways to open the Tasks view. You can open it from the vertical toolbar via the Tasks option, from the main menu via Events and Tasks/Tasks, or via keyboard combination Ctrl + 4.

Now a separate Tasks tab will be opened with the below layout.

In this screen you see:

• A list section with your tasks
• A calendar section
• A Show section to change the way you see your tasks

Creating a task

There are several ways to create a task in Thunderbird. You can start a new task directly from the Tasks overview, but in this article the focus is on turning actionable emails into tasks, since that is often the most natural way for emails to capture something you need to follow up on.

In your Inbox, simply right‑click the email you want to turn into a task From the menu that appears, choose Organize / Convert To / Task…. Thunderbird will now open a new task window.

In this window, the title is automatically filled with the subject of the email, giving you a helpful starting point. From here, you can adjust a wide range of details: the privacy level (Public, Show time and date only, or Private), the calendar where the task should be stored, the location, category, start and due dates, and the current status. You can also set a repeating schedule, add a reminder, attach files, and write a description using various formatting options. Under the Options menu, you can assign a priority level as well. When you open a task created from an email, you’ll see a link back to the original message.

Once you have entered everything you need, click Save and Close. Returning to the Tasks overview, and selecting All in the Show section, you will now see your newly created task listed alongside the rest of your ongoing work.

Showing, sorting and filtering tasks

When your Tasks overview growths, you probably want some tools to show, filter and sort your tasks. In Thunderbird it is possible to use the Show option to only show your current tasks, the tasks open for today, for the next seven days, not started tasks, overdue tasks, completed tasks, incomplete tasks, and all your tasks.

Further, it is possible to filter your Tasks on key words via the keyboard command Ctrl + Shift + K, or directly via the filter section. Here you can type one or more words to search for specific tasks.

It is also possible to order ascending or descending your tasks by clicking on one of the columns, like Title, Start or Due. If required, you can add additional columns to organize your task even more to your needs.

The above is implemented like below:

Showing tasks on your calendar

Like mentioned before, Tasks and Events serve different purpose while sharing the same calendar environment. Events appear as scheduled blocks in your calendar. Tasks, by contrast, do not standard set fixed time slots in your calendar. But you can enable showing tasks on your calendar by doing the following:

1. Open your Calendar view
2. Open Menu item View / Calendar / Current view
3. Choose the option Tasks in view

Now your tasks that have a start date and time will show up in your calendar.

Postpone a task

It is possible that you are unable to complete the originally planned task as scheduled. In that case, you could edit the task and adjust the date and/or time. However, you can also temporarily postpone the task. Do this by right-clicking the task and then selecting “Postpone Task.” You can choose from 1 hour, 1 day, or 1 week. 

Set up Tasks according to GTD

Earlier in this article, I wrote about the GTD productivity method. A key component of that method was the Clarify step, in which we determine, among other things, whether an email is an actionable item or not. If an email is actionable, you need to decide what needs to be done to finish it? David Allen came with the following set of questions to support this particular question:

Is the actionable item a do it now, delegate to someone else, or defer to do it myself later?

• If doing now, handle it in the moment, as long as it takes less than 2 minutes.
• If delegating, track it in a Waiting For folder.
• If deferring, track the action reminder in an Action folder.

If there are multiple actions involved to finalize the item, what’s the desired outcome?

• Track that outcome on your project manager.

For me personally, I translate this to the Tasks functionality in Thunderbird in the following manner:

• If it is doing now and it takes no longer than 2 minutes, I convert the email into a task, process the email immediately, and mark the related task as Completed. In this way I can see on my Tasks overview on a later moment that the email was indeed processed and finished.
• If it is delegating, I assign the email to another person with a specific assignment, convert the email into a Task, give it a category Waiting For and track it from there.
• If it is deferring, I convert the email into a Task, give it a category Action, plan it by giving it the proper dates, and track it from there.
• If multiple related actions are required, I convert the email into a Task, give it a category Project, and plan it by giving it the proper dates. But since there are more related actions required to finish this task, I manage these in my project management application of choice, as the Tasks functionality in Thunderbird is not suited for bigger, more complex assignments. But when finished, I mark the task in Thunderbird as Completed. In this way I can see on my Tasks overview on a later moment that the email was indeed completely processed and finished.

Note: Because the Category list already has a lot of options available, I create my own categories as mentioned above starting with a dot, like .Action, .Waiting For, and .Project. In this way these options are always at the top of the list.

Final words

Even though Thunderbird isn’t a true task management application like Todoist, the strength of its Tasks functionality lies in the integration of email management and task management, which work seamlessly together. Managing your actionable emails as tasks within the same application is effective and efficient. This further demonstrates the power of Thunderbird. We should be grateful that such a great and important application is available to everyone, free of charge.

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