For years now, the huge obvious missing hole in Google's online suite of applications is a to-do list maker, but not any more: Today Gmail Labs adds a Tasks module to your email account. The killer feature? You can add a Gmail message to your task list in one click or keystroke. To get started, enable Tasks in the Gmail Labs section of your Settings area, and a Tasks link will appear below your Contacts link. Click on that to make a Task list appear on the bottom right of your screen (like chat), and there you can create multiple lists and switch between them, indent items, and mark them as done. To turn an email into a task, from the More Actions drop-down, choose "Add to Tasks." There are also copious keyboard shortcuts.

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Windows only: WinWorkBar is a free, lightweight application sidebar complete with flexible to-do list, notes, calendar, and more. It may not look like much, and its meager 600KB download size and 6MB footprint may not sound like much, but this little sidebar application packs a lot of punch. You can customise keyboard shortcuts to quickly perform any action (e.g., show/hide the sidebar or create a new note or task), assign tasks and notes to any day or range of days (complete with reminder alerts), create repeating tasks quickly and easily, and automatically toggle the application's visibility so it's only taking up space when you want it to be. WinWorkBar doesn't do any fancy syncing (or anything all that fancy, really), but if all you're looking for is a powerful yet lightweight and unobtrusive to-do list manager, calendar, and notes application, WinWorkBar fits the bill. WinWorkBar is free and open-source, Windows only.

Windows and Linux only: A new release of the open-source, all-in-one email, calendar, and task manager Spicebird is now available for download. Kevin took you on a tour of Spicebird 0.4 back in January, but the new version 0.7 adds features and fixes. Notably, 0.7 got support for Google gadgets on the home screen, revamped instant messaging capabilities, Google Calendar support, and experimental blogging capabilities—see the full release notes for details. The Spicebird 0.7 release is a free download for Windows and Linux. Thanks, Asian Angel!

Springpad is a web-based life organizer built around a system of virtual notebooks. These notebooks, or springpads as they are referred to, are highly interactive. You can create task lists, add and edit notes, create calendar events, and tag every item for easy searching and list generation. Everything in Springpad can be dragged and moved both within and between the notebooks. Accessing related but scattered data is easy. For example, if you tag items that need to be purchased for your various projects within their special notebooks you can pull all the items tagged as purchases together into a master shopping list. Intelligent use of tags is one of Springpad's strong points, allowing you a higher level of interaction with your data than most traditional task managers. For an overview of Springpad's interface check out this demonstration video from their site:

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Nick Broughall, editor of Lifehacker's sibling site Gizmodo AU, had an organisational epiphany last week (clearly, he should have been spending more time here at Lifehacker) and decided to adopt Things and his iPhone as the centrepiece of a new getting-stuff-done approach. What's notable about Nick's conversion is that it came about after a seminar about how to get more efficient using a BlackBerry and Outlook, which proves yet again that technology is not really key to an organised life: it's making the decision to commit to a process and then sticking to it. Read the full post for how Nick's currently managing his working life; we might check back in a few weeks and see how well the system has stuck. How I Organised My Workload And Emptied My Inbox

When the iTunes App Store first opened up to eager iPhone and iPod touch upgraders (and iPhone 3G buyers), one of the first types of applications to show up was the to-do/task manager. From simple check-box lists to voice-transcribing tools, there's a bewildering number of apps, many of them free, that promise to help you keep track of your necessary actions and projects while you're away from your computer. Today we're checking out five of them, all free except for one requiring a "Pro" account, and comparing their features and functionality side-by-side, as well as asking which app you use to keep their busy lives together. Read on for the full show-down.

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iPhone/iPod touch only: Popular to-do list manager Remember The Milk has officially hit the iTunes App Store as a native application for your iPhone or iPod touch. Just like the web site, the application is lightning fast and simple to use but packs in some impressive features, including bi-directional sync, offline task editing, and even location awareness for sorting nearby tasks. The catch: In order to use RTM for iPhone, you'll need to have signed up for a $US25/year pro account. Remember The Milk is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

A good task manager is something that could make Windows Vista's somewhat unfairly maligned sidebar feature pretty useful—and Remember the Milk just so happens to be a pretty good task manager. Blogger Mark Godwin details how to turn the task manager's iGoogle gadget into a sidebar tool you can size any way you want. We've previously shown how to plant web gadgets into the sidebar with the Amnesty Generator, but Godwin's technique requires only a simple sidebar gadget installation, and it's time well spent. Got your own web-to-Vista gadget tweak to brag about? Tell us in the comments.

Windows/Mac/Linux (all platforms with Java): GTD Free, a Java-based desktop app, is one of the most straight-forward implementations of the Getting Things Done organizational system you'll see, but it also serves as a great introduction for the GTD-curious. Five tabs put your tasks in a sequential flow, and using them helps reinforce GTD's basic tenets in your brain. Bang out action blurbs in Collect, detail them in Process, file them in already-labelled folders like Actions, Someday/Maybe, and Projects, and mark them off in Execute. It's definitely not a lightweight, paper-like system, but it's a fairly clean implementation if you want to try Getting Things Done as it was really intended. GTD Free is a free download, works wherever the Java platform does.

Previously mentioned to-do manager Task Coach is now available as an updated standalone, portable version, fit for taking your tasks (and subtasks) along with you on your thumb drive. [via Portable Apps]