Microsoft To-Do has improved a lot lately and become even more useful tool to manage your tasks and available time. I have been using To-Do to manage both personal and work related tasks for a long time. Of course one single tool cannot solve all the task handling needs, but if you can manage most of your tasks on a single tool it’s a success – and with To-Do you can.
Here is my top five tips for getting tasks in control.
#1: Organize Your Daily Tasks with My Day
Start planning your day by adding tasks you are going to get completed to the My Day list. You can add tasks to My Day directly from a task pane, just by clicking Add to My Day, or you can pin tasks to My Day from For Today suggestions.
#2: Utilize Reminders
Besides reminding of your deadline, reminders are great way to remind and get back to not so important or later tasks. To-Do offers adding quick reminders for later today, tomorrow and on Monday next week or you can just pick a date and time.
I always add a reminder to tasks I want to get back to later and when reminder fires, I’ll check if I can do something about it to get it done or just postpone the reminder for later.
#3: Activate Flagged Emails and Spend Less Time Handling Emails
When checking your emails, flag those which require some action from you. When Flagged Emails are activated on To-Do, you can see them on To-Do’s Flagged Email list. You can manage Flagged Email as any other task on To-Do, like adding reminders, due dates or even make them repeatable (I don’t know why, but you could) or add them to My Day or one of personal lists.
#4: Use Tags to categorize
To-Do supports tags on task subject, on sub tasks and on task description! And tag acts as link, which opens a search results based on the tag. So you can get all your tagged items in single view across different lists.
I use tags to categorize tasks to certain context and get related tasks easily just by clicking a tag.
#5: Create Your Own Task Lists, Personalize and Make It Fun
Personal lists helps organizing tasks and for example separate personal and work related tasks. List are easy to create, organizing and you can just drag tasks into them. And to make it fun, add emojis to your lists and make it look even more personal.
Here is my example of personal lists, I’m still working on to getting a structure what is really supporting my habits.
What is coming to help you?
To-Do is continuously evolving and getting better. I’d like to point out two improvements, which could help you and your organization gain more benefits with To-Do.
Microsoft Graph API beta endpoint already includes API to read and do actions with To-Do tasks. This endpoint enables you to build custom solution, for example a SharePoint Framework web part to display your tasks on the intranet. I have made an example, which support also surface the web part on Microsoft Teams tab. If you like, you can check out the source codes on Github.
Matti Paukkonen 