7 Everyday Tips and Tricks for Rocking your Productivity with Microsoft To Do
Now that I’ve gotten the basics of using Microsoft To Do out of the way, it’s time to get into the fun — and useful — stuff.
1. Get organized with My Day
My Day offers you the opportunity to have a single list that includes all of your near-term or immediate tasks. Whether you prefer to organize yourself the night before or first thing in the morning, setting up My Day is an important part of every day.
Anything on My Day will disappear at midnight, but if you prefer to go through the thought process in the evening to prepare yourself the night before, here’s a hint: tag anything as My Day, because anything on your My Day that isn’t completed will show up as a suggestion the next day. In the morning, re-tag the appropriate tasks with My Day before your first cup of coffee and be on your way!
To organize your My Day, go into any task that you want to add to My Day and select Add to My Day; a shortcut is to swipe right on a task in a list and click the blue sun. If you’re diligent about setting reminders or deadlines, you can simply review your Planned list and add any appropriate tasks to My Day; if not though, feel free to review any lists to get the necessary tasks tagged to your day.
Note that My Day is not automatic (though if you’d like it to be, you can help up-vote this feature request). On the other hand, My Day includes something called Suggestions. To Do lets you know what tasks might be relevant to include in your My Day. Click the lightbulb icon to see what it recommends; it might save you some time.
My Day is definitely a best practice for task management: it’s important to think about what you want to get done today, be explicit about adding these tasks so you can tick them off as you complete them, and review your progress at the end of the day. It does a great job of telling you how productive you were (or weren’t) and how you can continue your success (or improve).
If you don’t review all your lists on a daily basis, I recommend doing a weekly review to ensure nothing gets lost (especially if you don’t set reminders and deadlines).
2. Swipe right for all the options
If you want to change what list a task is in, swipe right on that task, click the yellow list icon, then select the list you want to move that task to. While we’re discussing swiping, remember that you can swipe left on a task and click the red trash can to delete a task.
3. Customize those lists!
Emoji to the rescue ✅👍 😱🙏
Each list you have should be easily identifiable to make your To Do experience even better. Emoji — although sometimes cliché — can be a great way to visually indicate a list’s purpose. I have a car 🚙 at the beginning of my Errands list title, a wad of cash 💵 to indicate my Finances list, and a calendar 📅 for my Plans to Make list.
It’s easier than you think to replace the default checklist icon with an emoji: simply name your list with the emoji as the first letter — no space — then your title as you want it. The emoji takes the place of the checklist icon.
Since lists are not ordered alphabetically, the emojis don’t impact the order in which the lists appear; just hold a list and drag it to order however you wish.
Emoji are easy to find on iOS and Andoid since they’re built right into the keyboard. Use Windows + Period (.) to access them on Windows and Control + Command + Space Bar to get them on macOS. You can also copy and paste any emoji from the official source, emojipedia.org.
Fun fact: emoji look different depending on the device and operating system you use. And as new emoji are rolled out, Apple, Microsoft, and Google (plus others, like Facebook and Twitter) publish their versions of the new emoji on their own schedule. So if you notice that an emoji you added in To Do using your iPhone doesn’t show up on your Windows PC, it’s probably because Microsoft hasn’t published their design yet.
Theme it up
Each list can be personalized with a theme, too. In a list, click the eclipses and select Change Theme. There are multiple color options, as well as photos to choose from, so that you are innately aware of what list you’re in simply based on the color scheme or background.
4. Prioritize those tasks!
The more you use To Do, the more lists and tasks you’ll create. So it’s crucial to keep things organized. You can organize your tasks in each list in a way that makes sense for that list. To try it out, hop over to a list, select the ellipse at the top right corner to bring up the List Options menu > Sort to view the options to automatically sort your tasks (Importance, Alphabetically, Due Date, Creation Date, Completed, and Added to My Day).
Alternatively, you can manually reorder tasks by holding a task and dragging it to the appropriate location. I tend to manually organize my tasks in the order that I plan to attack them, regardless of whether I set reminders or due dates; this tactic can get overwhelming though, depending on the number of lists and tasks that you have at a time.
5. You can make sub-tasks? What!?
Some larger tasks can benefit from being broken down into smaller steps. Thankfully, To Do includes Steps, which are essentially sub-tasks. To create a step, go to your task and click Add Step to insert milestones to completion.
Each step can be individually marked complete, but the task will not automatically be marked complete when all steps are complete (which gives you the opportunity to confirm that it is in fact complete). And you can re-order them just like any task with a simple drag-and-drop move.
If you find that a task with a number of steps could benefit from being a full-on list with tasks, you’ll have to create it manually; there isn’t a way to magically convert a stepped task into a list. Maybe in the future though!
Now, one really cool tip: if you have a task that you decide later should really be a step within another task, drag the first task on top of the task you want to combine it with. But, be warned that you can easily [and accidentally] combine tasks when trying to manually reorder them if you’re not careful.
6. Yes, you can tag!
Feedback on my last blog post brought up a lot about searching and tagging tasks, so let me enlighten you on a great feature of To Do that you may not be aware of!
You likely have tasks or steps in different lists that are very related. For example: you might have a task to book airline reservations as a step under Microsoft Ignite within your Conferences list and as a task to book flights for your upcoming trip to Disneyland in a Vacation list.
When you get online to look at flights, it would be convenient to know all the travel you have on the calendar so you can do all booking at the same time or just have a central place to know of your upcoming flights. Have no fear: To Do is here to alleviate that information management nightmare!
If you add hashtags to tasks or steps, you can search for those hashtags. Add #Flights to any task or step that requires flight arrangements, and you can search for that from the main page by clicking the magnifying glass.
No, it’s not exactly built-in tagging the way you might think of it from Outlook or other task apps, but it absolutely works. Come up with a term scheme (taxonomy anyone?) that makes sense to you and stick to it. That way you’ll have central “lists” of tasks and steps that are actually in different lists; it just means the list this time is actually a search result.
7. Send feedback
Microsoft isn’t just some black hole when it comes to listening to its customers. If you have feedback, feature requests, or even functionality complaints, you should definitely head over to the UserVoice forum for Microsoft To Do. UserVoice is where Microsoft lets customers post ideas, requests, and bug fix reports.
Visitors can vote on requests to add more voice and hopefully prioritize a new feature or idea. So if you’re wishing To Do had a feature it doesn’t, don’t just stew in front of your laptop. Make a difference and vote for or submit community ideas!
Media credits to Microsoft, Wunderlist, and the author.
