How to use Microsoft To Do

hi everyone my name is Kevin today I want to show you how you can both get and also use Microsoft to do what is Microsoft to do it's a task tracking app that's very powerful but also very easy to use it's full disclosure before we jump into this I work at Microsoft as a full time employee and on that topic of being an employee at Microsoft I attribute a lot of my success at Microsoft to using a task list now I know that sounds kind of silly but anytime I go to a meeting anytime I talk to a colleague in the hallway anytime I get an email and there's some type of follow-up for me to work on I add it to my task list and so what this allows me to do it helps me keep on top of any of the work that I need to get done and it really makes sure that I'm productive and efficient with my time and today I want to show you how to do can also help you stay on top of your life and be more productive and efficient all right well why don't we jump on the PC and I'll show you how to take advantage of it to start off I want to show you how you can get Microsoft to do and there are a few different ways you can get it the first one and probably the most direct path is you simply navigate to to do Microsoft comm and that will drop you on the Microsoft to do homepage and then you look at the primary action here is get started you simply click on there and then you can get started with Microsoft to do another way that you can also get Microsoft to do is navigate to the website office comm and then click on sign in either path that you take you're gonna need to enter your Microsoft account if you already have one you could go ahead and just type it in here if you don't have a Microsoft account don't worry you can still get to Microsoft to do this text here says no account well don't worry click here to create one it's entirely free to create a Microsoft account it won't cost you anything at all now I've already gone ahead and logged in so I'm gonna go ahead and open it up now if you go directly to to do Microsoft comm and log in it'll drop you on the main to do interface and we'll get to this in just a moment if you go through office calm and login you'll land on the main office comm website and right here what you can do is to go to Microsoft to do you could click here so why would you go through this path first just to do that Microsoft comm well on office comm not only do you get Microsoft to do is a very very awesome task tracking app you also get all these other productivity tools like Outlook you get free cloud storage with onedrive you get Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote and the list goes on so you get lots of great productivity tools included alongside to do today's topic is to do so we're gonna ignore all these other ones for now and we're gonna simply jump directly into Microsoft to do and here I am in the main interface and what we can do is why don't we go ahead and simply create the task and what I'm gonna do is over here on the left hand side I'm gonna click on this one that says tasks we'll go through what these other options are in a moment but what I want to do is let's go ahead and just get our first task in here so what I'm going to do is let's why don't we create our first task and maybe this one is going to be welcome to Microsoft to do that'll be our first task and when you enter a task in here simply click on enter and here we have our first task on the task list one of the things that I can do is as soon as you complete a task there's this round circle right here I'm gonna go ahead and click on this and I get a nice little bell that congratulate Smee that I finished my first task so congratulations we've entered to do and we've already finished our first task it's actually pretty easy and fun adding tasks and completing tasks now what I want to do is this is just a generic list that you could throw tasks in but what I want to do is I want to actually create a list of tasks now the way to think of a list is this is a group of tasks so maybe let's say you have a grocery shopping list you could put them in a list or maybe in my case maybe if you let's say you want to start a YouTube channel maybe I'll have a list around starting a YouTube channel so whatever kind of a general topic is that you'll have a lot of tasks relate to you could create a list around those so in this case what I'm going to do is I'm going to start a YouTube channel and I'm going to create a list around that so I'll go ahead and enter that and here you see I have a list now and let's say that actually I meant to say start an amazing YouTube channel we're not just going for the kind of the plain and simple we want to make this amazing if you want to rename your channel or the your list what you could do is simply click on the name up here and then I could go ahead and edit it all right that's more like it this will this will really inspire us as we're creating a YouTube channel and what I can do then is on the right of a text I see the ellipses here or the triple dot and I'll click on that and some things that I could do for lists I could set a theme so right now it's in kind of a cool blue why don't I go with a calming green instead and so I'm gonna go ahead and set this theme for my list so there I go I have my list in place I've retitled the name and now what I want to do is I want to add some tasks under this list and so one of the things is when you're starting a YouTube channel well you don't want to just start a channel and not know what it's gonna be about so maybe my first task is gonna be what is the channel about we got to figure out what's the purpose of this fun story for my youtube channel I actually started with travel videos eventually and I finally pivoted my way over to tech and how-to videos part of the reason why is at Microsoft I work on office comm I read a lot of customer feedback and there's a lot of computer questions a lot of kind of assistance that people need and so I said hey maybe I can make videos that help make computers and different Microsoft tools easier to use and so that's part of the reason I landed on this channel type anyway let's go ahead and add some other items so not only do you have to decide what the channel is about but you know if you're gonna create a YouTube channel you also probably need some nice lighting hopefully you like my lighting that you see in my video you in this case I'm doing the screen recording video so I need some screen recording software I probably also need some editing software or once I record all my footage and let me throw in a camera because you probably all want to see my beautiful face I need a camera to capture it just kidding there and then I'm also gonna throw in a microphone as well this way you could hear me better now one of the things if you ever are considering setting up a YouTube channel or doing any type of recording a good microphone makes a massive difference if you use a built in microphone as part of a webcam or just a built in microphone on a top it's not gonna sound that good so very critical for setting up a YouTube channel so here I have all of my tasks on my list and one of the things that I want to do is let me actually click into one of these tasks to show you what you can do right now I just have kind of a basic task list here but I could do a lot more with these different tasks and this is going to show you some of the power of Microsoft to do so let's click on what is the channel about when I click on this task what you'll see is I have this pane appear on the right-hand side and what I can do now is I can click on this star and I can tag this or mark it as important so I could click there what I can also do is I could click on the star over here to mark it as important or to deselect it as being important one thing you'll see that happened is as soon as I clicked on the start moved it to the top of my list so to do is being smart about what my prioritized tasks are if I mark an important well it's probably a higher priority and to be fair before I get a microphone and camera editing software I should probably know what my channel is about so it kind of makes sense to move this one to the top within this pane what I could do is I could add sub steps so you could have a higher level task and maybe that task has additional steps that you need to get done so to figure out what my channel is about well maybe as a first step I want to go through and actually brainstorm ideas and so maybe my goal is let's brainstorm at least 20 ideas first and then maybe as a next step once I've brainstormed my 20 ideas let me narrow that down to what I think are the top three and once I have my top three maybe I could pull in some friends and family and then I could have them vote on what their favorite one is and then I can narrow it down to my top one and that'll help me land on what my channel topic is now as I go down here when I mark this one as important what's interesting is you'll see over here on the left hand side as soon as I mark something as important now it also includes it on my important list so I'll go ahead and click on here and here you see what is the channel about has been filtered or shown on this important view so I'm gonna go back to my list let's click back into this task one of the things I can also do within this pane I could add it to my day so let me go ahead and add this to my day and here to just like when I said a task to important you also see that it added a task to my day and so if I click on this now I see the task here now what's really interesting about the my day view is at the end of the day any task that's in this view drops off the my day view so every day you have to define what your my day tasks are and one of the really nice things about this is when people have done research on task lists and and tracking to do's one of the challenges is people are very ambitious about adding tasks and your task list grows and grows and grows and maybe you add another task here and another task there and one of the challenges is over time it becomes somewhat overwhelming because you have so many tasks on your task list my day aims to address this where at the end of the day they simply drop off and you have a clear list and then tomorrow you could go through and you could figure out what goes on my day view and what's nice is just like I went into this list and I clicked on this task and I added it to my day you could go into any task and add it to my day and in fact what I could even do is I could even click on this task and just drag it and drag and drop it over in my day as one way of adding it there so this way every day you get in a sense a clean slate some of the other things that I could do when I'm clicked into this task I could also indicate when I want a reminder so I could say hey remind me about this tomorrow maybe at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday I could add a due date so if I really want to force myself to you know make sure that I'm really getting this item done maybe I'll say hey let's say maybe tomorrow I should I should land on what my channel is about and here too as I select a date here you'll also see that it added it within this view over here in plans and here I see the due date appearing on here so as I go through each one of these tasks whether it's marking it as important whether it's adding it to my day whether it's setting a due date on this you'll notice in each one of these cases it's adding it to one of these categories the way to think of this is as I set different settings on this side in a sense it's tagging an item and then these are the different filtered views for those different tags that I assign to an item some of the other things that I could do on here is I could repeat tasks so let's say I don't know maybe you have an item household chores and one of them take out the trash and you do that weekly you could set it to recur or repeat and so that way you'll get a reminder every single week and you have to check it off as I go down to you can also choose a category you have different colors that you could assign to a task and these different colors can mean different things maybe red as urgent maybe green is a family item however you want to organize you could use these categories how you see fit I can also attach an item if I want to do this this opens up the windows file picker or whatever operating system you're on it pulls up the file picker and then I could also add in a note here so I could add some additional context now if I go back to the main task view here what I can also do is I can right-click on an item and this brings up a context menu here and within here you'll notice that many of these different controls that I have are very similar to the pane on the right here I could add to the my day I could set importance I could set the due date but I do have some additional controls down here that I don't get in the right-hand pane what I could do is I could create a new list from this task so let's say I started adding things and maybe it doesn't really fit in create start an amazing YouTube channel so I could just create a new list I could also move tasks around to different lists or it could copy the task to a different list so lots of task management controls when you right-click on a task now that I've added my tasks in here and I've added a few different filters to the item what I can do now is well how do I prioritize my tasks that I see in this view one really easy way to probably were ties my tasks is I could simply click on an item and I could drag it in my list so I could pull this down and maybe I pull the light up and so I can move things around the list as I see fit what I can also do is another way to organize this list not only can I drag and drop but what I can do is I could go up to this sort drop-down and here I could sort by importance so there are my most important items will show up at the top I could sort by the due date I could sort by any tasks that have been added to my day sort alphabetically and also by the creation date so I have lots of different ways to sort and then here you can adjust the order in the in the order that it sorts these items so I could have importance at the top or importance at the bottom and if I want to get rid of the different sort I could go ahead and click on this X and that will remove this sorting again this list here this is all focused on equipment getting my channel started but let's say that I want a different list to keep track of all of my video ideas what I'm going to do is I'm going to add another list now and this one is gonna be called video ideas and I'm going to type in the list name and I'm gonna hit enter so now I have two different lists one of the nice things that Microsoft to do allows you to do is you can also group together lists so here I'm going to create a group and maybe I'm going to call this simply YouTube so all of my YouTube content I want to put all of my YouTube related lists within this group and so what I could do is I could pull the video ideas list into this group and I can also pull the original list into here as well that we just looked at and so now I have a group with separate lists under that group and so this is a nice way just to organize all the different lists you have so maybe you know in this case I might have my YouTube group and then maybe I have a personal group or I have things like grocery shopping or household chores so you could organize it in whatever way you'd like to now that I have my list created one of the very powerful features of Microsoft to do is that you can share lists with others so with my one list here start an amazing YouTube channel let's say that I wanted to collaborate on this with someone else what I could do is I can click on the list and I could right click on it and then I could share the list from here what I can also do is up here in the top right hand corner I also have the option to share the list from here I'll go ahead and let's click on this and what I can do is I could create an invitation link so with this invitation link anyone will be able to join and then also edit this list now imagine that you and your wife or you and your husband let's say that you want to have a shared list maybe household chores and you can assign a bunch of tasks to your husband I kid you not this is what my wife does to me and so what you could do is let's create an invitation link and what I could do then is I could invite someone via email or I could simply copy this link and I could message it to someone I could use whatsapp or I could use text message and I could send this link to someone and then they can work with me on this so I'm gonna go ahead let's let me copy the link here and I can now send that to someone from my clipboard so this is now a shared list and you'll see this icon appears here indicating that it is a shared list one of the things I could do now is if I click on one of the tasks let's say with the microphone I don't really know what microphone to get if I click on the task microphone now I'll see all the same details that we saw before but I see an additional category now called assigned to if I click on assign to what I could do is anyone who has gotten access to this task list I could assign the task to them in this case I haven't invited anyone else yet or no one else is joined but I could go ahead and assign it to myself and you'll see that my initials show up now indicating that this is my task if I had someone in else invited to this task list I would see their initials show up to whatever tasks that they own so in a sense not only can I track my own tasks very easily it also allows me to track team type tasks now what I see is now that I have assigned to tasks to myself once again I'm going to go over to the left-hand side and I see this assigned to you category if I click on that I could see a list of all of the different tasks across all of my different lists that are assigned to me so another nice way to tag tasks and then to filter those by different categories now I've shown you how to create tasks within lists how to create lists and we've also looked at how different items show up within these views but I'm not just limited to items showing up in these views by tagging it what I can also do is I could simply type in an idea directly in here so I could click on add a task I'm gonna go ahead type in the task hit enter and now this shows up in my important view but it doesn't show up on any of the lists and let's say I typed it in I know this is important so I typed it in here what I could do is I'm going to right click on this and now I can move the task and I'll put it in my video ideas list so how do you use Microsoft to do let me throw that in as a video idea so I could also go ahead and create a task and say my day important or planned I could create a task here first and then I could assign it to so you could either create a task and a list first or you could create the task first and then assign it to a list or heck you don't even have to assign it to a list however you want to work to do has a lot of flexibility now I'm gonna jump into my start an amazing YouTube channel list here and one of the things I want to do is I've been very productive since we started chatting I like to multitask so while I've been giving you this adore tutorial of to do I've also been getting some things done I did some research around microphones I ordered a microphone I did some research on cameras and I bought a camera so let me check that off once again there's that satisfying Bell that you hear that lets you know that you completed some tasks and they now show up in a completed view I could also go ahead and minimize that list or I could expand the list so I could decide whether I want to see everything here or only things that still need to be done now let's say I go back to my day view and you know I'm here and you know maybe I have a lot of tasks on my list and you know I remember that I had one around getting a light so let me go ahead and here I can click on search and let me type in light and their search is very powerful where it simply looks across all of your different tasks and here it surfaces this task right here and then I can jump into that task very quickly using search aside from me just going ahead and adding tasks in here and searching for tasks that I created especially at my job at Microsoft one of the biggest sources of tasks for me is email you get an email someone asks you to do something you know you could read the email and then just manually type in a task in to do or what you could do is I can click into Outlook so I have my outlook inbox open and here's an email I got from the windows insider program so maybe I want to go ahead and read this email and so that's a follow up for me where I want to read on read about this so when I hover over the message in Outlook what you'll see here is I have these different icons I could delete I can mark as read or here I could flag this message and if I go back to Microsoft to do now one of the things that you'll see is that flagged message will show up in my flag to email category here you see the email message shows up in here so I tagged it in Outlook and now it's up on my list so this is another place that I could keep track of what I need to get done so I have the ability both to create my own tasks and also to flag emails as tasks and emails tend to be one of the biggest sources of tasks that you need to get done and here too even with this task what I could do is I could right-click on it and I could add it to my day if this is something that I want to follow up on today now we've gone through most of the core functionality in Microsoft to do but I want to finish off with one additional thing and I'm gonna go over here up on the top right hand up here on the header and I'm gonna click on the Settings gear and this opens up a pane with a whole bunch of different settings and now there are two interesting settings that I want to call out so you have all sorts of things where you could set whether it plays a sound whether you have to confirm before deleting but the interesting ones is you could turn on additional views here if I turn on all I also get an all list over here that shows me all of my tasks across all of my categories and I also have the ability to view a completed list so here this adds an additional view here so let's say you're at work and maybe your boss is asking you hey what have you done recently turn on that completed view and you get a quick view of everything you've accomplished and gotten done all right well that was a quick tutorial of how you can use Microsoft to do to be more efficient and productive if you found this video helpful and you think you are now a task master give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this in the future hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future feel free to leave a comment down below I read them all and I'll add it to my list of videos to create you know this is actually one of my biggest sources of video ideas I've gotten lots of suggestions before and then I've created videos based on those suggestions alright well that's all I have for you today I hope you enjoyed and I hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 369,091

Rating: 4.9401569 out of 5

Keywords: kevin stratvert, Microsoft todo, to do, microsoft to do, tasks, task, gtd, get things done, getting things done, todo, microsoft, office, microsoft 365, office.com, ms, microsoft tasks, outlook tasks, outlook, assign, share, to-do, list, app, lists, office to do, planner, to do list, free, win10 to do, windows 10 to do, to do manager, big to do list, todoist, ms to do, to do list check, how to use, how to, tutorial, guide, help

Id: MCc56WuQMjk

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020