How to use Microsoft To Do for Getting Things Done (GTD)

did you also make a video about microsoft to do in gtd microsoft could be very helpful in the next video on luca's to-do list can you do what for microsoft to do okay fine you got me i'll do it yeah i'm not the biggest microsoft fan in the world especially when it comes to user experience but by popular demand i'm gonna have a go at making microsoft to do work as a system for getting things done or gtd for short alright so to capture we have something that's not very intuitive by its name but what is actually an inbox it's just called the tasks list inside of microsoft to do so this is something you're going to have to get used to what this list signifies is it has anything that isn't part of another list that we can see below the line here on the left sidebar so by nature that's the default place you want things to land in you can do so by adding a task from the middle bottom side here or easily via mobile which you will see now and that's the task we already just saw in the tasks overview when it comes to organizing our system we've got a couple of pre-made lists on the left here now some of these you'll recognize as the smart list that we saw in the settings such as planned or a collection of every item but there's also something called my day now this is something you can basically interpret as a focus list i personally wouldn't use it that much but it's there you can't remove it so if it's useful this is how you can do it it also provides suggestions now let's look at how we have set up our list structure the good thing about to do is that you can set up lists and you can also organize them in folders so the first folder we created is for the more runway level my tasks and projects so what you will see is a standalone items list which contains tasks that don't have multiple steps attached to them to achieve their outcome we have a routines list which we can use to put recurring tasks into we have a project list this is just an example so you can also add projects here and what you will see here is the outcome is to create a youtube video like the one you're watching now you could say that creating a video comes with several phases and so some of these tasks are more sequential instead of putting every task on its own though i used the task here as a denominator for what's usually a section in other task managers so here you can see for example the preparation section or the preparation phase and i used subtasks to actually add the individual tasks to it that we can check off and mark complete once these are done we can move on with tasks in the other sections we have a reminders list speaks for itself obviously like the tickler file you can add any reminder here and to actually remind yourself you must use the remind me functionality you can select pre-made time or you can pick one of your own and select the date and the time and save it that's how you add it to the list for some they may be like your bucket list you can obviously have one but you can also use the organization here with the folder so you can create a new group you can give that group a name and then you can move the lists under the group and from there you can perhaps create sub lists many people perhaps want to have a restaurants i want to eat at least recipes to cook travels to make purchases etc for agendas this is basically where you store your talking points for people when you see them or when you have a meeting so what you could do is it also use the subtask functionality here let's say we have a friend or a colleague named bob we just put his name in here and then we add these quote-unquote steps to indicate talking points number one question whatever and then whenever we see bob all we have to do is search for his name and there it is and we can just check the lists the higher horizons of focus can see things like your goals for example you saw the youtube project well that's related to a goal that you may want to hit 1000 subscribers and you can set a due date for that task quote unquote that could be the deadline to reach the goal by that time so you can get creative here and you can also add notes to any task which is helpful perhaps you want to elaborate on some things but it doesn't go as far as tick tick for example where you can actually add a note that's something that to do doesn't really offer however you can still use it if you want to for example define your purpose you can provide the more elaborate version of that here same goes for your vision or your areas of focus if you want to define those separately as well to work from context instead of just having a list of all the items and trying to make sense of it all we want to actually have a way to separate by context and what you may have noticed me skipping earlier in the video something we'll look at now because to-do actually allows you to create tags and associate those with tasks the problem though is there is no way to see a list of those tags anywhere natively like on the sidebar however whenever you do click on a task with a tag it will show every item that has that tag as well so instead what i did here is kind of create this pseudo tag list called contexts and these items should never be checked off unless the context perhaps will be removed but from there you can just add the tag as well with the hashtag you can click on it and then we can see every item that has this tag certainly not perfect but it does get the job done so here i press laptop and you can see all the tasks related to my create a youtube video project that have this tag now this is nice and you can also star those items so you can translate the important smart list as your contacts list if you wish for even easier access however what if you have a project predefined like this one where you already knew the steps you want to take and they're sequential so you don't want every task to show up in your next actions list right away perhaps the production phase hasn't started yet however there is an item there that can be done on our laptop called edit video but if we press that then we can see every item including ones that aren't due yet so what i did here is to actually create a separate tag named next and if we press that we can see an overview of every next action still not perfect because we can see different contexts within it however if you actually combine these two search queries it will show only the tasks that have both tags so let's say we've completed this item here write script for our next youtube video we can mark it complete and once we've marked it complete we have to navigate to the project it's a part of and we can see here that two out of two sub tasks have been completed which means this phase is complete we can select the next task or the next section i should say and here these are all items that we can perform from our studio which have the studio tag as well now that their next actions all we have to do is add the next tag to it as such we copy it we press enter we do the same thing for these tasks and now when we do the same here in the search bar we can see those items appear in our next actions list with the studio context so one more time let's look at our inbox and pretend that this task has something to do with the youtube project and it's a task that we can perform from our laptop so what we can do is add the laptop tag and then we can move it into a different list we can do so by right clicking it and moving the task to any of the list that we've created or by actually dragging it into one of those like drag and drop and there you can see now it's part of the youtube video project and if it's a next action we can also add the next label to it and then it will show up in our next laptop list for routines you can create recurring tasks here and then selecting the repeat functionality and there you can set it to repeat any of these intervals or even a custom one which is nice so here's an example of taking out the trash i can do that from home and i just need to do it every week so when i mark it complete you can see it automatically created a new task for me to perform in seven days if you want to use microsoft to do as your reference software as well i would say proceed with caution because there's no way to create a task that cannot be completed and this means you risk losing some valuable pieces of information such as maybe you want to put a copy of your passport here now it's cool that you can add a file to any task which allows you to upload attachments you know like a pdf copy but the fact that you can market complete and lose it is a significant risk now here obviously it still shows as the completed task but you just don't want that option to even be there for something like reference so if you want to go all in on microsoft perhaps you can use onedrive or any of those other services by microsoft like onenote as well to actually store information instead of this system if you do just make sure to be careful when it comes to reflecting such as doing your weekly review though it's nice to be able to select and create these new lists so you can just create one call it weekly review and then add any item that belongs to the review and the fact that you can create a task complete it but still see it means that once you've completed your review imagine this is a full list you can just uncheck every item and it will show up again when the time to do your review has come well i guess this shows that you always need to have an open mind because i remember telling many of you requesting me to do a video like this that it just wasn't going to be possible it just shows have an open mind and you can get very far apply some creativity reinterpret some of the lists and then you can make microsoft to do a decent system for gtd good luck if you want to try it out and let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions for other software i should check out see in the next video you

Channel: Lucas Prigge

Views: 29,473

Keywords: microsoft to do, gtd, microsoft to do gtd, getting things done, microsoft to do getting things done, to do gtd, to do getting things done, microsoft gtd, microsoft gettingt hings done, microsoft to do tutorial, how to use microsoft to do

Id: Nob50sN4be0

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021