I jumped to Microsoft To-Do, and you should too

I was hesitant to make the jump, as I was in love with Wunderlist. I had Flows, IFTTT, iPhone, Outlook calendar and more, all integrated and working together. I’ve been eyeballing To-Do for quite some time but never could commit since my stupid-large complex needs across all the aforementioned services.

Then I decided to take a look and they’ve gone and done it. They’ve simplified things to the point that my stupid-large needs also got simplified, things got easier. I can confidently say Microsoft To-Do is worth it!

Luise Freese [MVP] shared her 11 reasons why she fell in love with Microsoft To-Do. Check it out, it’s a great list and continued to foster my love for To-Do. She was also very supportive on Twitter as I was jumping into To-Do. Thanks, Luise!

It’s all about My Day

I’ve grown to rely on Wunderlist, for virtually everything. I live my days through my to-do list because I have a lot on my plate. My head can’t keep track of everything I have to do. With Wunderlist, for me to plan my day, I had to set due dates to today, and remove due dates from items I didn’t want to do today. It wasn’t terrible, I could get it done riding the train, but it just wasn’t practical. Changing my due date changes the item’s meaning. I never liked changing it as I wouldn’t remember what the original due date was. I got into the habit of writing the date in the task title so I would know when it was originally due.

Not very efficient.

With Microsoft To-Do, I can pick and choose which items I want to work on today, regardless of due dates. It’s really fast and easy to go through what is due today, yesterday, tomorrow and pick what I want to work on.

Tomorrow, My Day points out what I may have missed the day before, and I can quickly bring them into my day. This is gold for me. Going through day after day, train ride after train ride, to just move items around by changing dates was more annoying than I knew. This new My Day feature helped me realize how much easier this can all be.

Such a small feature, with huge impact.

Integration in Outlook

If you didn’t know, To-Do is has replaced Tasks in Outlook online.

Click the To-Do logo and you get all of your To-Dos.

What about Outlook in Windows? Great story here too! The icon hasn’t updated yet, but I can click the Tasks option and see all of my To-Do lists as if they were traditional task lists.

All of my To-Do lists look like folders in Outlook Tasks.

I didn’t have to do anything to get this to work, meanwhile, with Wunderlist there were some integration steps to get this working (and I’m not sure how to get it out of Outlook now).

Flagged emails are real tasks

This was one area I spent a lot of time with Wunderlist. I had a hugely complex Flow to monitor for flagged emails and put a task in the right list, with importance, due dates, etc.

Microsoft To-Do supports Flagged Emails natively. It creates a new task in your Flagged Emails list. From there, you can move them to the appropriate list, set due dates, etc. You can also quickly get to the email right from To-Do!

I think I overcomplicated this for myself in the past. Jumping to To-Do helped me rethink some of my practices and simplify things tremendously.

Recurring on my schedule

This one goes into the “duh” list, something Wunderlist didn’t do. To set up a bi-weekly reminder, I had to set something to weekly, then ignore it every other week. If I remembered to ignore it the right weeks…

Yuck.

With Microsoft To-Do, I can set up more flexible recurring schedules for my items. I can set up daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly, yearly and custom repeat schedules. I now have my coveted recurrence of every 2 weeks!

 

You have to check out Microsoft To-Do

Go on, check out To-Do. It’s really slick, fast, the mobile works just as well as the desktop. The only big piece I’m missing is commenting. In Wunderlist, I could write comments on a task, and use it as an audit log of work done on the task. To-Do has a notes field, but not a comments option. A little bit of a pain as I have to time stamp my notes myself, but not a show stopper for me!

What do you think? Are you using Microsoft To-Do? What’s your favorite feature?