It’s been a while since I wrote about Microsoft To Do, which is Redmond’s premiere to-do list platform these days. I released a video course on how to use Microsoft To Do last year. But you might wonder, six months later, how do I feel about it now?
Here is my current thinking: Microsoft To Do is now my first recommendation when current Outlook users ask me what app to use to implement my simple One Minute To-Do List (1MTD) system. And that’s mainly because of its simplicity and its excellent smartphone apps.
To be clear, it is not my choice for MYN users (readers new to my work: see the difference between the 1MTD and MYN systems at this link). And that’s fine, not everyone needs the more powerful (and complex) MYN system; 1MTD is quite good for most people.
Let me drill down on why I like Microsoft To-Do so much for the 1MTD system.
Simplicity
To Do is a nice, simple to-do list system that is optimized for ease of use with non-confusing, highly intuitive controls. The average user can jump right in and start using it immediately.
It has a good drag-prioritize capability, meaning you can drag and drop tasks vertically to show their relative importance.
And if you link your To Do account to an Office 365 (Exchange) account, or an Outlook.com account, then emails you convert into tasks in Outlook will drop right into To Do.
And as you can see in the free videos at this link, To Do sets up quickly for 1MTD.
Good Smartphone Apps for 1MTD
It also has very simple mobile tasks apps on iPhone and Android. This is a big deal; Microsoft has never created smartphone task apps before. And these apps are well designed and easy to use.
Also, while To Do is primarily web based, Microsoft has created desktop task apps for this module that run on Windows, Mac, iPad, and Android tablets. So, Microsoft has done a good job of creating a multi-platform to-do list system that competes well with the many other multi-platform task apps on the market.
And by the way, all of the apps are free.
Nearly Identical Apps
That multi-platform presence is important by the way. In the past, your only options for accessing Outlook tasks away from Outlook were third-party apps that, while powerful, were not as simple, and you needed to learn the interface of each one and configure each one differently.
But the high degree of integration between the the various platform To Do apps is impressive. They all look and function nearly identically. If you drag sort a task in one app, almost instantly that task gets repositioned in the other apps. Any setting changes you make in one app migrate instantly to the apps on other platforms.
So for all these reasons, these days for Outlook users, Microsoft To Do is my first choice for implementing 1MTD. If you want to learn how to do that, watch my Microsoft To Do 1MTD video course.
Not for MYN
But all that said, Microsoft To Do has nowhere near the feature list needed to fully implement the more powerful MYN system. A user can get moderately close to MYN using some tricks in To Do, as I show in the aforementioned video course. But it’s just not good enough for processing high volumes of tasks.
Case in point: Right after I released that video course, I tried for months to use Microsoft To Do for real my business needs. All my daily tasks went into it, and it was pretty good for a while. But then my work pace increased, and To-Do just couldn’t keep up. I finally gave up and went back to the Windows desktop Outlook tasks system.
That experience confirmed for me that the Windows desktop Outlook Tasks module is still the most powerful task systems available, and it is still my choice for MYN users.
Future of Tasks in Microsoft Office
But it is also clear to me that the Microsoft To Do platform is the future of task processing in the Microsoft Office ecosystem. In fact, I would not be surprised if Microsoft eventually abandoned the older but more powerful Tasks module in favor of To Do.
Is that really going to happen? Well, Microsoft is slowly but steadily merging the feature sets of online and desktop Office apps, with the online versions getting most new development. And as of today, Microsoft has almost fully switched over Outlook Online to To Do tasks. Really, only time will tell.
The good news is, for my simple One Minute To-Do List system, To Do is a pretty darn good to-do list platform.