I have been using a new app for the past week or so, called Missive (missiveapp.com). When I first looked at the tool it was just a social email client, by which I mean a client for email that also support social communications extrinsic to email, but possibly about email. However, at that time I found that I could use a Google exention to integrate it with Todoist (see Missive looks like a MVP ‘Social Email’ tool). But now, they’ve released their own task implementation.
Here’s a screenshot to reprise the basics of Missive:
Above, on the left you see an email being edited — a reply to an email from Carlos Kelly — but on the right is a chat among Rafael and others working at a company called Conference Badge. They can share docs — like the PDF quote — and talk about the email thread. The email becomes shared, as are the chat comments and attachments.
Missive also supports group chats not explicitly linked to specific emails, as shown above.
But what is most exciting — and what I have been waiting for — is the addition of tasks to Missive. These have been implemented as a special version of the basic comment feature in chats, except the user selects the task option:
Above you see a comment being created, and as you see they can be assigned to one of various users.
And above, you can see that tasks have a status box so that someone can check off the task as done. (Personally, I favor a three state model — created, in process, completed — but I will wait to convince them of that.)
All open tasks are visible in the ‘tasks’ section of the client, which shows all chats with tasks and provides a count — like 1 of three — to indicate how many tasks are contained and completed.
Missive builds on Gmail, and allows users to file emails in gmail labels. These will be for personal, private use.
I’ve been told that this simple organization technique — I’ve been bumping my head on it for just a week or so, painfully — will be extended in the very near term with tags. As a result, I will be able to pull into a single list all the tasks that are tagged ‘#projectXYZ’ or ‘#finance’ no matter what chat they were originally created in.
Tags, unlike labels, will be shared and available to those in your Missive ‘organizations’ or teams. I am eagerly awaiting the release of tags in Missive, to make it a richer experience and one that is much more manageable. I am also awaiting due dates, and other metadata for tasks, but tags are the most important, I think.
The Bottom Line
Missive is an example of content-based work management — where the tasks are embedded in chats associated with specific email threads or chat contexts — based on a social email foundation. I believe this is one of the few models of work management that will attract a large user base following the decline of web 2.0 era work media tools (like Yammer, Jive, IBM Connections, and so on). Yes, Slack and its work chat direct competitors are getting a great deal of the buzz at present, but email is here to stay, and the emergence of social email — like Missive and its competitors — will be giving email another decade or more of life.
