Hey, these tasks are pretty lame! What's the point?
John Reekie, 4 Aug 1999

Well, this is a simple feature that we provided because we think it's useful. It's not supposed to compete with Project or whatever, and here's why:

The goal of this site is to support collaboration between geographically dispersed researchers. All of the facilities on this site are there because they help this goal! If you are able to coordinate and manage your collaborative work using some other tool, great! However, sometimes it's just easier to use a simple web-based tool than something more elaborate, so we provided one.

We have found that tasks are useful for simple to-do lists, and for recording future tasks in a place where it's hard to lose them (as it is with email, for example).

If you try it, let us know if it is (or isn't) useful.