Everything you need to know to get started with Microsoft To Do

I’ll admit it upfront: I love lists. I get a rush of adrenaline every time I get to check something off and I feel accomplished for doing sometimes minor tasks.

So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Microsoft To Do is my new favorite check list app. It’s one of the newer app offerings in Office 365. Microsoft acquired the company behind Wunderlist — a popular consumer task app — and incorporated a re-named and re-imagined Wunderlist as part of Office 365 with the signature check mark.

Task offerings abound in Office 365, from the original tasks in Outlook to SharePoint task lists and from Microsoft Planner to Microsoft Project. To Do, though, is task management built from the ground up for the end-user perspective on personal tasks.

Getting started

To Do is available to pretty much all Office 365 customers. If you have an Office 365 account, you can simply log in to To Do using your email address and password. It’s likely you’d already see To Do on the office.com portal, listed with your other Office 365 apps.

You can access To Do across a multitude of platforms including your web browser, mobile apps for iOS and Android, and desktop apps for Windows and macOS. They all work basically the same way and no matter which apps you’re logged into, your tasks should sync seamlessly across all your devices.

Built-in lists

There are six lists that come standard in To Do (though some may need to be enabled).

• My Day: You can manually add any task to your My Day list. My Day is your opportunity to review your tasks (regardless of what other list they may be in) and add any that you want to accomplish that day. My Day allows you to have a clear idea of what you want to complete on that given day. It helps keep you from getting overwhelmed by all the tasks you may have in To Do.
• Important: To add any task to your Important list, click the star next to a task name. Save this space for the critical or easily-forgotten tasks that you want to make sure are highlighted for the future.
• Planned: Any task that has a reminder set or a due date will automatically be added to Planned where the tasks are generally listed in chronological order. This gives you a good overview of how you should set up your upcoming schedule to manage these tasks.
• Flagged Email: You can enable any email that you flagged in Outlook to automatically show up in To Do as a related task.
• Assigned to you: Any tasks that are assigned to you in To Do, Outlook tasks, or Microsoft Planner — even by other people — will automatically be added to Assigned to you.
• Tasks: This is a place to keep ad hoc tasks and tasks that don’t fit any of the lists that you’ve created.

Creating tasks

To create a task, hop to an existing list and click the Add Task button in that list. If you don’t have a personal list that makes sense, you can always create your task in the built-in My Day, Important, Planned, or Tasks.

When you create a task, you’ll only be asked for the task title at first. Once you name your task, you can open it to update other fields. These fields can be really useful:

• Star: To the right of the task name is a star icon. Click it to mark the task as important. This automatically adds the task to the Important list.
• Steps: Some tasks require sub-tasks to complete. If this task isn’t important enough to split into multiple tasks or to create a new list with all those tasks, use the Steps option to spell out all the steps in the process to complete the task. You can re-order steps by clicking and holding, then dragging to the new desired location (so don’t worry about getting them in the correct order right off the rip). Mark each step as complete and once all are completed, you can mark the whole task as complete.
• Add to My Day: Add any task to My Day by clicking this button. It gives you a great way to manage only what you’re working on today.
• Remind Me: Set a reminder to work on this task sometime in the future. You’ll receive a standard notification on your desktop computer or mobile device. You can choose from pre-set dates and times or you can set a custom date and time for your reminder. Any task with a reminder set will be automatically added to your Planned list. Note that Remind me is not connected to Due Date.
• Add Due Date: Most tasks are due by a certain time, so this field lets you set when that is for a task. Any task with a due date is also automatically added to the Planned list. You can choose from pre-set dates and times or you can set a custom date and time for your due date. Note that Due Date is not connected to Remind Me; you won’t automatically receive a reminder just because you have a due date (until it’s potentially too late).
• Repeat: If this task occurs at a regular frequency, you can set this up so you don’t have to manually enter the task each time. Once the task is marked complete or it’s gone past its due date, the repeat is enabled and the task will appear with the new due date.
• Add File: You can attach a file to a task to keep the file handy when working on the task. Keep in mind To Do isn’t meant to be a file repository and it’ll lack some of the more major features in tools like SharePoint and OneDrive. If you need more advanced features like version control and co-authoring, use SharePoint and OneDrive instead.
• Add Note: You can add details to your task with the note field.

Creating lists

As you add more tasks, you’ll definitely find that you want to keep them organized. Lists and groups help with that. You can create a list by clicking New List on the bottom of the To Do home screen. Name your list however you’d like. As you need to create new tasks on this topic, enter the list and click Add Task to create your task in that list.

There are a lot of options for how lists present themselves. If you open a list to show the tasks, there’s an ellipses in the top-right corner of the list. From here you can rename the list, move the list, change its group, etc., but the more important thing to take away is you can choose how tasks are displayed. Click Sort and you’ll see you can sort your tasks by important, alphabetically, due date, creation date, completed, and whether they’re added to My Day. And each list can be sorted differently depending on your needs. You can also decide whether to show or hide completed tasks.

Lists also come with themes. If you’re not using dark mode, themes will add a colorful header and background color to your lists, which can help you know immediately which list you’re in just based on the color scheme.

Creating groups

Groups are a level up from lists. You can add multiple lists to a group to keep those lists sorted to meet your needs. For best practices on organizing your lists and groups, I’ll be covering some insights in a future blog post, so stay tuned!

Connections to Outlook

To Do has recently taken the place of tasks in Microsoft Outlook. This is kind of a big deal considering the tasks section of Outlook has been standard for decades. To Do is significantly more feature-rich than Outlook tasks and was really built for a mobile world, whereas Outlook tasks were not.

To Do tasks should automatically display in Outlook for you. If you’re using Outlook on the Web and you’re viewing it “the new Outlook”, the tasks button actually brings you to To Do with an Outlook wrapper (but, it’s still To Do).

Another integrated feature is the ability to add an email as a task in To Do by opening the calendar/task button in the suite bar and dragging an email into the pane that pops up. It will automatically create a To Do task for you.

And lastly, you can automatically display flagged email in Outlook as tasks in To Do. You have to enable this if you want to use it and once you’ve done that, you’ll automatically see these tasks show up in the Flagged Email list. More details are available on Microsoft’s website.

Connections to Planner

Microsoft Planner is a project management app that rolled out to Office 365 customers a few years ago. If you’ve ever used Trello or similar bucket-style project management tools, that’s effectively how Planner works. Planner is great for smaller teams who don’t need the complexity of Microsoft Project but need a group-based task management solution that’s more powerful than Outlook tasks (or To Do, for that matter).

What complicates things, though, is Planner is now another place where task listings might live. But thanks to a recent upgrade to To Do and Planner, you can now view Planner tasks that are assigned to you right in To Do. This is where the Assigned to you list comes in; your Planner tasks will show up there. To view your Planner tasks, you have to take the action in To Do to make sure those tasks display in To Do.

You can find the instructions on how to view Planner tasks in To Do — plus all the details of that feature announcement — in this To Do blog post from May 2019.

Wrap Up

That’s all you need to get started with To Do! Enjoy checking off those tasks as you kick butt throughout your workday and personal life. Stay tuned for more posts as I explore and share my To Do journey with best practices, example lists, deep dives into my intensely fierce lists, and how they work!

Media credits to Microsoft, Wunderlist, and the author.