Today we’re going to be looking at a task management app that Microsoft has call To-Do.
It’s designed to be a more modern, flexibly take on the task app that you have right now
that’s part of Microsoft Outlook.
This does sync with Microsoft Outlook, so you don’t have to do a hard switch.
If you want to look at it, it’s going to pre-populate with the tasks that you already
have, but it’s going to give you different ways to organize them.
We’re going to use To-Do to show you the increased flexibility and depth that it has.
In order to do that, we’re going to say that I woke up this morning and I had an epiphany
that I wanted to change everything about my life.
I’m going to move out West to become a lumberjack.
We’re going to use these different features to get that done and we’re going to increase
the flexibility as we go so you see these different things.
The first thing that I need to do, I’m in Tasks right now which is just the main list,
I’ll come over and left-click on the plus sign that says Add a task and I’m going
to say I need to start chopping trees.
I don’t do that very often, and if I just go try to be a lumberjack, it’s going to
be very painful.
I’m going to saw some logs.
I’m going to practice climbing trees.
I have these three tasks now and I’m going to have a lot more, but these three kind of
belong together.
So, we’re going to create a new list to group these together.
It’s an untitled list so we don’t want that so right click on it to Rename list.
I’m going to say Get in shape.
We have our first list here that’s a custom list.
We’ll go back into Tasks and we’re going to drag all three of these into Get in shape
because that’s where they belong.
And in Get in shape, what you can also do is you can change the color, change the themes
of these.
I’m going to make this one Blue.
The other thing that you can do that’s kinda cool, kinda silly, is change the icon.
Let’s make this one someone flexing their bicep.
The next is, I need to move.
I need to move to where there are tree farms, right?
I’m going to say Move out west.
Do you capitalize West?
I’m going to.
If you move out West, that’s where the large trees are.
Are icon for that, it’s going to be, this little icon here.
It has a tree in it, right?
OK, that looks good.
Now we’re going to get more in-depth.
We have this next custom list.
As you noticed, I started putting things in Tasks, but I moved them down.
So the Tasks, it’s its own list, and it’s empty now.
So we’re going to work in Move out West.
I need to research moving vans because I don’t know anything about them.
I need to do that soon, so I just left-clicked on that and it brought up all of these options
on the right-hand side.
What we’re going to do to research a moving van is, we need to do that next week.
We need to get that done.
Now, you’ll notice here, we need to add a file as well.
If I left-click on Add a file, it’s going to bring up a file picker.
I have no idea what that it, but we’re going to upload that here.
You can do more than one, it’s waiting for the next one.
Just add some notes.
Say, I prefer the one with the yellow trucks.
Whichever one that is, I don’t know.
When you come back and you look at this task, it’s showing you on the screen, without
drilling into it, when the due date is, that it has an attachment, and that there’s an
associated note with it.
You’ll start to see that, visually, this will be handy that you don’t have to click
into everything to get a good overview.
I need to pack.
I don’t have an exact date that I need to pack by so instead of doing a due date, I’m
just going to have it pop up and remind me.
I’d like to get started soon so I’m going to have it remind me tomorrow but there is
no due date on this.
You can do either or both similar to how you could do it in Outlook tasks.
That’s all I need to move out west.
That’s going to get it done.
Let’s do one more list.
We’re going to do three of these groups of lists and then we’ll see what these other
options do at the top.
This is going to be Apply for jobs.
We’ll pick a nice icon for this.
We’re going to be applying a lot.
It’s going to take a lot of time so I’ll need some coffee as I do it.
Of course, that’s going to be the icon for that.
Let’s have this be red because I’m going to be working hard.
I’m going to be tired, red hot.
There we go.
Let’s add a task.
Now, the first thing I’m going to do it, Start to look online.
But this is a more in depth one, so we’re going to use an ability - well, first we’ll
give it a due date.
We need to start this one soon too, but why do today what you can do tomorrow so we’ll
make this Tomorrow.
This one has several sub-steps under it.
I look at this as layers.
The first layer is the list, the second layer is the task, and now there’s a third layer
called a step.
The first step will be Choose which online site.
There’s a million of them, we’re just going to stick to one.
Hit enter, let’s get ready for the next step.
We need to decide on the keywords.
Do I type in lumber and let it search for that or woods, paper?
We’ll see.
Then start applying.
Those are the three steps that I need.
If we come back here and look at the main task, it says 0 out of 3.
If I check one of these off.
This is the first time we’re going to get to do this.
Listen [bling] ahh!
Now it says 1 of 3.
If you have several of these listed, you’re going to see the status of the steps without
drilling into them.
The next thing we want to do is subscribe to the paper.
Because I’m thinking that lumber jacks don’t always go online, right?
So they might be looking at the paper for jobs.
We’re going to find out which paper we need to subscribe to and do that.
That doesn’t need to happen for a while because I’m not even sure where I’m moving.
We’ll just do that on June 7th.
And the last thing would be if I used a hosted Microsoft email solution such as Outlook.com
or hotmail, I could flag an email.
I can’t do that in this account because this is a personal account and I don’t use
Microsoft for my email.
I’ll show you a screen shot of another account that has flagged emails.
If you were doing this in a team, someone could give you a task through Microsoft planner
and those would come in here as well.
But, we’ll just stick in my little free personal account here for now.
Let’s head up to the top.
You can see that one of these is already populating.
There’s a list called planned.
I didn’t make this list.
It comes pre-packaged in Microsoft To-Do.
Left click on it.
It’s showing you an agenda, if you will, of when certain things are due that we just
planned.
And, there’s something else a little bit finessed going on here.
Next to the due date, there’s a little icon.
I think it’s a calendar.
If it’s just a reminder, there’s a little icon of a bell, so it is showing both of them.
This isn’t showing all of your tasks though.
So, Planned if very helpful, but be careful.
If you did not give something a due date, say if I just wanted to get in shape and saw
logs, we were doing this in the beginning before we were doing due dates, it’s not
on here.
Be careful if you want to be a good log sawer, don’t just use the planned list, right?
The next list that’s up here is called important.
If I come back to Get in shape and I think sawing logs in important.
I want to do that.
Not on a particular date, but I need to keep that in mind, it’ll stay on the list called
important.
You can pre-populate with a list of things that you really need to get done and keep
them on your mind throughout the process.
Then, I save the best for last.
I think it’s at least the most unique feature.
It’s called My day and the thought of this is that you are in control of your day.
You may have all of these things that you need to get done, but today is a new day.
This list starts blank every day and you add things to it that you want to get done just
today.
I just left-clicked.
You can add a task right into here.
What you can also do though is go, oh today I really need to start tree chopping so I’m
going to right-click on that, left-click on add to My day.
I also need to research moving vans.
It’s not due for a while, but I need to start.
I’m going to due that today as well.
It puts the My day indicator here, but, what it also does, it fills it into My day.
I woke up, I got organized, and I said, these two things, I really need to do today.
I know I need to keep sawing logs on my mind, and this is what I’m doing in the future.
When you’re using My day, there are some smart suggestions.
So there’s a little bit of A.I. in here.
You left-click on For today, it’s thinking that maybe you want to do some of these.
We’re just going to keep it as a--oh snap--we’ll pick one more just because I feel like the
computer did all of this work.
We’re going to think about climbing some trees.
We’re going to spend the day in the woods.
And there you are!
You can access a lot of these options by right-clicking.
I’ve been dragging things around in this tutorial, but you can mostly get it done by
right-clicking.
The mobile apps are going to work in a similar way.
They’ll have similar options.
It’s easier to show things when I can have a mouse that moves around on the screen.
To learn more about To do and to compare it to some other organization apps, check out
this playlist and don’t forget to subscribe if you want to see more videos just like this.