> If you still do the work that emails contain, you still have a todo list other people can put things on, don't you?

Sometimes, but not always. As your inbox volume increases, the % of things that come in that you don't want to become work for you also increases.

Note: I don't consider myself "famous". That said, I've gotten some good mainstream press related to my projects and I've also gone out of my way to make myself available to people by sharing my time, experiences, and lessons learned. This has paid off MASSIVELY and I wouldn't change that. What it's lead to, though, is the impact of a lot of people who don't think about the work they're creating for someone before they hit send. They're not forming complete thoughts, really asking for what they want/need, and in some cases, even asking anything at all.

I wouldn't give up the 20% of high quality email I get for the 80% of difficult to process email I get, but the 80% is still there.

That means that a pretty significant % of the non-spam emails I get are emails that need more work done to them before they're complete enough for me to do anything with them.

If I think of my inbox and assistant as a worker queue, it's their job is to keep incoming messages from being lost and disorganized, and in many cases, preparing the information/requests in the email for being worked on by me.

Maybe the issue is that the person adding things to my to-do list knows my workload, my priorities. The person emailing me doesn't have that context, and rarely has the consideration of it in the first place.

There is not a one-to-one correspondence between items in my inbox and items on my todo list, and items in inbox don't necessarily say what I need to do.

e.g. an e-mail in my inbox asking me to clean the frobulator might translate to one of the following todo lists:

a) 1. clean the frobulator

b) 1. buy frobulator cleaning fluid 2. empty the frobulator 3. clean the frobulator 4. refill the frobulator 5. reply to sender informing them that the frobulator is now clean

c) 1. reply to sender telling them why I can't/won't clean the frobulator

d) (no action necessary)

But my inbox won't help me remember which of these is the case. And that's ok, because that's not what it's for. That's what my todo list is for.

That's part of the issue.

But this application proposal - and many peoples' workflows for everything from day-to-day email to customer support treat their inboxes as to-do lists. It's a bad habit, one I had myself and had to work HARD to break. An email interface that trains people out of that habit, or keeps people from forming it, would improve productivity for a lot of people without them even realizing it.