break a task down into steps (or sub-tasks).set due dates and times and/or flag tasks as important.

Now it is beginning to get integrations with other Microsoft 365 products like Planner and even Teams. However, the power of Microsoft To Do for me at least, comes in its integration with Microsoft Outlook. It has a clean interface and is simple to use. That’s not how I use it, but I can imagine it would function pretty well. You can use To Do as a standalone task management app. It gained a lot more users – and usefulness – with the introduction of Microsoft Office 365. So what is Microsoft To Do? An early version of the app was released in 2011 but I don’t think many people noticed it. They’ve subsequently modified that app and turned it into a completely rebuilt version of Microsoft To Do. In 2015, Microsoft acquired one of the more popular to-do apps called Wunderlist. Unfortunately that functionality was a bit hard to discover, which is why many people continue to use more complicated workarounds. And of course there are literally hundreds of standalone task management apps available on both Android and iOS, but all of these had the big disadvantage of not syncing with Outlook.Īnother more direct workaround was to use the Reminders app on an iPhone or the Calendar’s tasks list on an Android device, both of which could be synced to Outlook via MS Exchange. Another was to just use the the native Notes app on my phone as my to-do list. One was to email myself a note prompting me to add a task in Outlook when I was next at my computer.

Prior to finding Microsoft To Do, I used a few different workarounds to meet this syncing challenge. It’s called … wait for it … Microsoft To Do. As it turned out, Microsoft were a step ahead of me and had already built an app to do precisely this job. I use Outlook Tasks extensively and didn’t want to have two separate to-do lists to manage.

Productivity Training for Executive Assistants & DirectorsĪ few years ago now, I was looking for a way to quickly enter tasks or to-do items on my phone in a way that would immediately synchronise with my task list in MS Outlook Tasks.

Microsoft to do in outlook