Unlock Epic Excellence In Life With Free Microsoft To Do
Managing the day to day with some tech magic…
Those who know me, understand my passion for note-taking applications, and Personal Knowledge Management or PKM for short. I love to find new ways I can use Obsidian to capture ideas and enhance my approach to study. Coming in a close second though is how you can use technology for task management to keep all the things you need to, in some order.
Let’s be honest, there is not shortage of applications available today to help you manage all the daily professional or personal tasks. Some of the software can be part of some pretty comprehensive workplace solutions, and some can be as simple as a mobile app on your phone. One thing is for sure, it can all get pretty personal when people start to share. Just as people get passionate about their note taking applications, task management systems and they way they are used become a constant source of pride. Today, I am not here to force you to some sort of change, but I would love to share with you some of the experiences I have had using what we have from Microsoft with To Do.
Getting in order with Microsoft To Do
Microsoft To Do was released back in April 2017 (according to Wikipedia), and has undergone not just many updates, but has gradually been integrated in to many applications and services, and enhancing the way those integrations are elevated through different applications. As I have been using the app more and more, and getting ready to present how people can use To Do as part of their free account, I wanted to share with you some of the cool things I have found, if you will share with me the time.
Hashtags exponentially increase organization
Hashtags have become a daily part of our online life to help describe or categorize something, in some cases, even to categorize the things that happen in the physical world, as my daughter likes to remind me with the #boomer. Well these very same hashtags can be a way to quickly add valuable metadata to your tasks, and group them together in a very efficient manner.
All you need to do is add a hashtag in the title of a task, once you have done that you have now created a user defined category. Now when you click on the hashtag in your list of tasks it will use it as a search term and will instantly filter all your tasks by those with the same hashtag.
Flagging email becomes a task in To Do
In today’s daily grind, it’s no doubt that email, is one of those applications that we spend a lot of our time in, and if let out of control, becomes the main dictator and consumer of time. Many people over time have managed to implement their own frameworks to email management by quickly scanning their email, flagging what is important that needs responses now, action later, or to be ignored.
Microsoft To Do with its integration in to Outlook makes sure that those emails you have flagged become integrated in to your To Do list. So rather than having one application and list for managing action items, and another application for managing the actions for your email, the integration between the two apps ensures that there is one core list to be able to work on.
The nice thing is the backward integration in to Outlook ensures that once you check off the task inside To Do, it will check it off in your email as well.
Creating more explicit actions on an email
While the previous feature makes it easy to have all your flagged email summarized in to a “Flagged Emails” list in Microsoft To Do. You can actually turn an email in to a To Do task more explicitly.
To do this, when you are in Outlook online, just go up to the top menu bar on the right and click the “To Do” integration, you will find it nestled between the OneNote and Settings buttons. When you click this, you will get the option of selecting a view that starts with your calendar, or a To Do view. Once you have done this, simply click on your email and drag it over to the side window on the right-hand side of your screen. If you were on the Calendar option, the top drop point will let you create a task in To Do, and the bottom larger drop point will create an event from the email, If you were on the To Do option, the drop points would be reversed.
At this point when you drop your email on to the “Add as a Task” option, it will create a proper task in your Task List. In fact, if you change the selected task list and drop it in to that, then it will add it to that specific task list, otherwise it will be added to the main task list where everything lands.
Bonus Feature: If your email already had a color category associated with it, that same color category will be transferred in to your To Do list as well!
Scheduling time for your To Do actions in your calendar
This is actually one of my favorite features, we all know that one of the key things you can do, is to set a due date on your task to ensure its done by a certain time, but what about the reverse… have you ever considered how you commit time in your calendar to a certain task?
When you are in your calendar in Outlook live, open up the To Do list like you did in the previous example, and see your To Do tasks all listed out. Then select one of your tasks, and drag it on to your calendar. What this will do will create an automatic 30 minute event on to your calendar with the same title as the task itself. This will help ensure you commit your time to the task at hand, and not just get a reminder of when it is actually due.
You can also do this with a bit more control, by right clicking the To Do action item and selecting “Block Time”, which will give you more control over the details in the creation of the event.
Watch Out: One of the things you need to watch out for though, is that if you update the title of the task, it will not update anything you have dragged in to your calendar already. I am hoping this is a bug, and not by design, but will be reaching out to the team on this one.
Adding a To Do task to a Calendar Board
Calendar boards are very cool, and I will be the first to acknowledge that I have not used them enough, but there are probably a lot more people who don’t know they exist. If this is new to you, take a look at the video below.
In a nutshell, a Calendar Board is like a life planner where you can aggregate your calendar, actions, key contacts, post it notes etc all in one location.
One of the nice things inside To Do, is the ability to right-click on a task and add that task to a Calendar Board as a separate object to interact with, and add data to.
Once on the board, anything you do in the To Do app will sync the item on the calendar board and vice versa. You can add new steps, tick them off, everything is integrated and synced together.
Watch Out: There is a strange occurrence where if you change the title of the task in the To Do list, it will have some trouble syncing and say it has been moved on the Calendar Board, but if you change the title on the Calendar Board, it seems to sync the other direction ok.
Take Action Today!
As stated at the beginning Microsoft To Do is one of the many applications and services that people can use for task management. With its integration between email and calendaring, it can be a very powerful application that can help you take control of what you need to do in life.
Thanks for reading, please leave a clap and comment on other things you would love to explore.
