Learning and implementing a new habit takes time and lots of repeats before it becomes automatic. Intelligent tools can help you starting the process. I wanted to learn new a work-life habit, get some structure to my mornings and organize my daily tasks. I set a goal earlier for spending less than an hour weekly on emails, based on MyAnalytics, which I have been failing most of the weeks. So, I set my self a repeatable tasks on Microsoft To-Do with sub-tasks, which I should go through and complete on every work day.

Repeatable tasks

Setting a task to repeat is really simple on To-Do, just by opening a repeat setting on task pane. Repeat is currently available on tasks and flagged emails.

With custom setting it is possible to select repeat time frame in days, week, months or year.

Repeat is really a combination of due date setting and repeat setting. For example, if you want to have a repeatable task on every Thursday, you need to set due date to Thursday. Due date is automatically set for today or the date entered on reminder. Notice that reminder is just a single date and it is not following the repeat setting, although it would be nice feature to have repeatable reminders also. And don’t set due date in the past, because you need to complete all repeats starting from that date.

Did it work?

Here is my daily start-up list, which is repeating on weekdays. So every workday morning I’m starting with this task list and organize my day.

I have a separate Reminders task list, where I have several repeatable tasks to remind me of important things. I don’t need to put those in my calendar anymore and tasks just pop up on my Planned list.

And it did work for me. I learned and implemented a new work-life habit. I think it took me two to three weeks to make it automatic in the mornings. I disabled the repeat, but kept the task hanging in my Reminders list, because after summer vacation I might need to start it all over again or at least remind me of my new habit for couple of days.

Here are couple of my earlier Microsoft To-Do blogs, which might be helpful.

5 Tips for Microsoft To-Do

Planner ❤ To-Do – Personal and Common Tasks in Control