So the OneNote to Microsoft To-Do link would be highly useful if you're using lots of To-Do's in OneNote & MS ToDoList. So Scenario is:- The Trigger on OneNote would be 'When a Todo is created' The action could be to 'Add to Microsoft ToDo List' Then this could link the two up together and cou. Nirvana is a to-do app, built for Getting Things Done®, that helps you clarify what's relevant now, so you can accomplish big and little things when it counts the most. Use Nirvana on iOS, Android, and the web.

• Using Outlook Tasks Gtd
• Gtd With Microsoft Planner
• Microsoft To Do App Tutorial
• Gtd With Microsoft 365
• Microsoft To Do Gtd Setup

• Visit us tasks in sync at your desktop and on the go. Get organized and set priorities to get things done!Chapters:0:00 What can T.
• Microsoft To Do. To Do gives you focus, from work to play.

Despite my best efforts to avoid such a fate, my regular day job requires the use of a Windows-based PC. I could probably opt to use a Mac with Parallels, but I’m not there yet. One day, perhaps.

Where this is most impactful is in my productivity workflow. For all intents and purposes, I have multiple to-do lists spread across different operating systems, and I have to double my work in a few different areas to keep things synced and consistent. I would love to see Things 3 adopt a web-based option.

Recently, I took a deep breath and a step back to see what kinds of cross-platform GTD options there are available to hybrid Mac and PC users. And while Todoist may be the immediate thought for most Sweet Setup readers, it was actually Microsoft’s own To Do app that caught my attention.

I can almost perfectly replicate my Things 3 setup inside Microsoft To Do and have cross-platform support to boot. In fact, it’s so close to be replicated functionality that I may abandon Things 3 for good.

Or at least until I can convince my boss to let me run Parallels on a Mac.

Microsoft To Do’s Core Features

Microsoft’s To Do app has come a long, long way since inception and today reflects a full-fledged, full-featured GTD app that will meet the needs for many users. Because I’m coming from a Things 3 background, everything in my mind works in relation to how Things 3 works — “Areas”, “Projects”, the “Today” view, and “Upcoming” are basic lingo in my vocabulary, so forgive me for using these in the place of To Do’s choice of verbiage.

Working through Microsoft To Do’s left sidebar of Smart Lists from top to bottom:

• My Day is essentially Things 3’s “Today” view. My Day shows all tasks due today. You can add a task to My Day by tapping on the task and selecting “Add to My Day”.
• Important showcases all your starred tasks. Tapping on a task provides you an empty star to the right of your task name and tapping the star adds it to the Important queue. I don’t know if Things 3 has a specific “Important” view, but OmniFocus’s “Flagged” system comes to mind.
• Planned tasks are akin to Things 3’s “Upcoming” tab, where future tasks are separated between “Earlier” (tasks that were previously due), “Tomorrow”, two to five days from now, and “Later”.
• Assigned to You works in tandem with Microsoft Office 365’s Planner and Teams apps for grouping all your assigned tasks in one spot. Having this built into To Do ensures there’s no excuse for missing a task assigned by your boss.
• Flagged Emails is To Do’s hallmark feature in my mind — if you use an Exchange email address, any flagged email inside of Outlook will show up nearly instantly inside To Do.
• Tasks is effectively an uncategorized catch-all location for all your tasks from a birds eye view.
• Groups are basically Things 3’s Areas, allowing you to group lists into a set context. I use the term “basically”, as they aren’t as powerful as Things’s Areas.
• Lists are projects which can be titled with a general title and can house entire lists of tasks for completion. There are no header options here for grouping like-tasks together.

Evidently, there’s a lot of overlap between the best GTD apps like OmniFocus and Things 3 and Microsoft To Do. In many ways though, To Do’s functionality extends beyond what we’ve seen in OmniFocus and Things 3 and offers some quality-of-life features that made me raise my eyebrow.

Handy Features Inside To Do

Microsoft To Do can be customized visually to suit your aesthetic tastes. Each list can have its own theme, spanning across multiple pastel colors or even photos (which are shown in To Do’s light theme during the day). Smart Lists (like My Day, Planned, Flagged Email, etc.) can all have their own themes as well.

Tasks can be added with natural language parsing, bringing the best of an app like Fantastical to Microsoft To Do. Typing in “Call Bob on January 26 at 4:30PM” immediately provides a tappable option for adding the task with a reminder at the specified time or a due date at the specified time. The parsing isn’t perfect, mind you — a task like “Buy Christmas Gifts on December 4, 2020” left the word “on” hanging at the end of the task.

Individual tasks can quickly become their own mini-project by adding a “step” to the task. When you tap on a task, simply tap “Add Step” to add additional tasks to the main task. This is great for when you don’t need a full project (like a “List”) yet have multiple steps to get from Point A to Point B.

As mentioned above, Planner tasks can be added directly to Microsoft To Do if you use Office 365’s suite of apps. If you don’t use Planner though, you can turn off these Smart Lists inside of To Do’s preferences view. Best of all, empty Smart Lists can be hidden when no tasks are open or available in that view. This provides a cleaner sidebar if all tasks assigned to you have been completed.

My personal favorite feature is the ability to view all flagged emails inside Microsoft To Do. My email inbox is effectively a second task list that feels like an impossibility to complete. Using To Do’s flagged emails feature, you can flag an email inside Outlook, archive the email in Outlook, and still view the email as a task in To Do. Once you unflag the email in Outlook, To Do automatically picks up the email’s status and marks the task as completed. This feature pulls double duty in cleaning up your email inbox and putting all actionable task emails in one consistent spot.

Unfortunately though, I’ve run into a couple snags with flagged emails. For one, it requires an Exchange email account. I’m not sure how common Exchange email accounts are (we’ve been happy with the feature set and sync speed in our small office), but there are some off-putting reviews online. If you’ve avoided Exchange, you won’t be able to utilize flagged emails inside of To Do.

I’ve also run into some syncing issues when using Outlook’s desktop app on my Windows PC. So far, I’ve only been able to flag an email in Outlook for iPad, iPhone, and Mac and have it show up in To Do.

Lastly, a bonus feature: Tasks in To Do can have files attached to them, allowing you to quickly reference a photo, screenshot, or a file (like a PDF) right in the task’s meta data. I find this to be particularly helpful when referencing screenshots — simply take a screenshot, annotate the screenshot with iOS’s annotation tools, and attach it to the task. This specific feature is one I’ve been wishing for in Things 3 for a long time.

Other Snags In My Workflow

No GTD app is without its hiccups, and there are a few in particular which will throw some users for a loop.

For instance, “Groups” have the sole purpose of separating “Lists” from one another, which means you can’t drag individual tasks to a group. In Things 3, you can move like tasks to an Area and then open up that Area to view all projects and individual tasks at once. In To Do, only lists (projects) can be added to the group, limiting the power of creating separate groups (areas) in your life.

Secondly, there’s no separate inbox in To Do. “Tasks” acts as a catch-all area for all your tasks not assigned to a list, which includes upcoming tasks, repeating tasks, and one-off tasks. If you’re an adherent to the Get Things Done philosophy, the lack of an inbox may be a dealbreaker.

There’s a chance neither of these snags will get in your way if you’re dying for a true cross-platform task management app to work between macOS, iOS, and Windows. But if you’re a creature of habit or rely heavily on the complete GTD philosophy, you’ll have to test To Do to see if it’ll work.

Wrap Up

Anyone who has a family, multiple jobs, goes to school, or volunteers on the side will be hesitant to change up their task management workflows, simply for fear of missing something amidst all the chaos. I’m certainly one of those people — once I found a home inside Things 3, I admit to shutting myself off from any other GTD app available. Even if those other apps are better suited for my needs, the risk of missing something was and is too great simply due to breaking habits.

So why Microsoft To Do? And why now?

To Do has come a long way in recent months in terms of design and functionality. Further, our office recently adopted the full Business Premium suite of Office 365 tools, opening the doors to Planner, full-featured Teams, OneDrive, synced files in Word and Excel, and synced calendars in Exchange.

As it turns out, Microsoft To Do may end up being the single biggest surprise in our jump to Office 365. Having all your tasks in one place, scattered in from Windows, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS — and being able to nicely integrate your dreaded email list with your task list — could be a game changer for anyone wanting to use a Mac yet required to use a PC.

Outlook continues to hold its own as the workplace email program of choice.

Outlook has a number of integrated features designed to help you save time and stay organized, as well as a host of plugins and add-ons that add capabilities and integrate other features within the basic Outlook services. Highlander: the card gamedeck ideas.

However, it’s not always easy or intuitive to use a productivity system like Getting Things Done (GTD) with Outlook, because Outlook is designed for people who work, manage time, and manage emails in a particular way.

If you are seeking ways to implement the GTD Outlook method, here are some ways to adjust your Outlook software and your email management practices to be compatible with GTD principles.

1) GTD Outlook Rules and Folders

Outlook has a number of flexible and powerful rules you can use to automatically sort emails into folders without manual review and sorting.

While the initial setup may take some time and tweaking, devising some simple rules for your emails keeps them out of your inbox and clears your mind from unnecessary clutter, freeing you up to Get Things Done.

2) Disable Notifications and Popups

The core of Outlook GTD is to work on one thing at a time without distractions. Disabling features that interrupt or distract you allows you to work with full attention on the item at hand.

Check your GTD email and messages set-up at specific intervals that you have scheduled, so that you manage your own time. It may take some discipline at the beginning, but the increased productivity and reduced stress will pay off later.

3) Getting Things Done Outlook and Your Calendar

Don’t use your calendar as a to-do list or vice versa. The getting things done outlook principles are that only things that are specifically bounded in time should be scheduled in a calendar.

Not only does this keep your calendar more accurate and increase your reliability, but it makes it much easier to shift tasks and priorities as needed. Instead of managing your task list as “what to do on Thursday,” streamline your list down to “what to do next.”

4) Sort Action Items From Non-Action Items

If an email contains an actionable item, and it takes less than two minutes to do, do it immediately. If it takes longer than two minutes, add it to a task list and get it done according to your priorities.

If an email isn’t actionable, archive it or trash it. Reducing inbox clutter is essential to the GTD Outlook method.

Many Outlook users read an email and then flag it or mark it unread to remind themselves to follow up with it later because it’s a habit developed out of using the software for a long time.

But that habit eventually leads to a cluttered inbox, time lost trying to find items that were flagged, and endless distractions as you scan different messages looking for the one you want.

Unfortunately, even with these systems and practices in place, and a strict following of GTD methods, there are a few things Outlook simply struggles to do well without a good GTD outlook add in or GTD and Outlook app:

• The built-in flagging of emails is an inefficient way to associate specific reminders and action items with emails
• There is a great disparity between “read” emails and “completed” action items, and users have to spend time and cognitive energy distinguishing the two. Preview panes often confuse the issue, leading to things being marked as read when they really weren’t, and vice versa
• It can be difficult to add time-bounding to tasks or emails so that they fit into a schedule. When an email becomes a task, any contextual information or scheduling information has to be annotated separately and can’t be attached
• For project-based work with component tasks and communications, it isn’t simple to a group, categorize, and communicate tasks at a project-level
• It is not easy or intuitive within Outlook to organize tasks by priority and then rapidly change priorities, although that is frequently a necessity at work

While it is possible to compensate for these inherent Outlook weaknesses by creating and tweaking an array of custom rules, filters, and categories, the task of implementing, adjusting, and maintaining that system is time-consuming and complicated, and you spend more time administering Outlook than in getting your work done.

A faster and simpler approach is to adopt a GTD for Outlook tool like Flow-e. Flow-e integrates with Outlookand replaces the Outlook interface with the Flow-e system. Using Flow-e with Outlook makes Getting Things Donbe faster and easier, with:

1) Better management of tasks

Using Outlook Tasks Gtd

If a GTD email system contains an action item, it becomes a task with a simple drag-and-drop. Those action items can be sorted, grouped, categorized, and prioritized visually, and contain comments or additional information.

2) Better management of projects by using GTD in Outlook

Tasks can be easily grouped or categorized into projects, broken into delegable-subtasks, with built-in tools for scheduling, follow-up, and accountability

3) Visualize everything

Flow-e makes it easy to quickly assess next-task priorities and the status of tasks and projects with its visual interface. Flow-e is the perfect GTD app for your Outlook. Rather than reading a list or opening a calendar, your workload is visible at a glance.

4) Better tracking of completed items

In many workflows, finished tasks just disappear or are moved off a list, while Outlook tends to keep them on the list by default. Tracking of finished tasks is important for many reasons:

Gtd With Microsoft Planner

• When a project is finished, it may be necessary to review component tasks and completion schedules in order to assess the project as a whole
• When reviewing your own work and productivity, it can be useful to review and acknowledge what you have finished
• Managing completed tasks is emotionally satisfying, and the process of either reviewing them, grouping them, or disposing of them can add a valuable psychological boost to stressful work

Microsoft To Do App Tutorial

Outlook is a powerful tool for workplace email and communication, but it has significant limitations and doesn’t always work well with a productivity system like GTD.

Gtd With Microsoft 365

Adopting an additional tool like Flow-e enhances Outlook’snatural capabilities, compensates for its weaknesses, and streamlines your time and inbox management.

Microsoft To Do Gtd Setup

Pictures credit: Freepik