Planleaf: Super Simple Task Management

If you work a lot over email and often send to-do lists to yourself and your colleagues, you're going to love Planleaf. Launched just recently, Planleaf is a light and simple email-based task management solution. In fact, it's so light and simple that you don't have to download, install, or sign up for anything. Rather, Planleaf works with something that you already have – email.

To begin, all you have to do is write an email and cc tasks@planleaf.com. Start each task with a dash, e.g. “- Order business cards” and assign or share tasks by adding the @ symbol in front of a colleague's name à la Twitter, e.g. “- Send status report @Jim.” Planleaf will then turn your email into a formatted to-do list email, complete with check boxes. Every day or on demand, the service sends collaborators a daily digest email of outstanding and completed tasks.

Concerned about privacy? Only you can see your data, as well as anyone you choose to share it with. According to Planleaf, your data is not published on the web and much of it lives right inside your own email account. The data that's stored on Planleaf's servers are protected by industry standard practices and the company uses Secure Sockets Layer encryption to transfer sensitive information. Planleaf does not store passwords since it requires none. Furthermore, employees are not allowed to access the info in Planleaf's database unless they're authorized to – upon the request of a customer or to troubleshoot an issue, for instance.

Founded by Omar Qureshi and Ahmed Farra, Planleaf is based in Waterloo, Ontario out of the University of Waterloo's Velocity Garage incubator. The team is currently working on new features such as sending email notifications before tasks are due. They're also planning to add a web-based component for checking off tasks.