MS To Do started as an auxiliary applet for tasks and other lists (such as grocery shopping) within Outlook, integrating with Outlook Calendar. In the days of pervasive monitoring, it would also offer to generate a task out of what you were writing in response to emails, in which case it would annotate your Outlook calendar and remind you of your task if you happened to mention the person/company again, such as in another email.

To Do is, at its heart, a List app and it gives you lists in two categories: Lists, and Smart Lists. My Day, Important, Planned, Assigned to Me, and Tasks are all Smart Lists. You can’t delete or rename those, and that’s a benefit, because they help categorize your tasks as you put them in. Lists you create are not Smart Lists, and can be renamed or deleted. To Do provides Shopping and Grocery Lists by default, and you can delete or rename those, too.

To Do retains a good amount of its traditional behavior, and that’s a good thing. You can share tasks and other items through Outlook with others, and you have access to your tasks on the web, on your phone, and as a Windows Store app, if you choose. Tasks are part of your Microsoft/Office profile; it even uses your preferred email alias.

Minding one’s own business or not is a recurring theme in technology, and To Do is no different. Many of us have stories of Alexa or similar spying on us. Outlook itself is now completing your sentences.

Smart Lists, Lists, and Tasks

In that tradition, To Do will determine some things about your Task in order to put it in one or more of the available Smart Lists:

• When you add a Task, it always appears in the Tasks Smart List. (All Tasks are Tasks.)
• You can assign a List for your Task, and it will appear there.
• If you assigned a Due Date for your Task, either by adding date-specific text (e.g. ‘Scoop litterbox by Friday‘) or by toggling the “Add due date” calendar within the text and selecting a date there, your Task goes into Planned.
• You can share Lists and Tasks with others, and they can share with you, likewise. When you receive a Shared Task, you’ll see it in the Assigned to Me Smart List.
• Tasks that are toggled Important (right-click, Mark as Important) will appear in the Important Smart List.
• Finally, any uncompleted Task with a Due Date appears in My Day.

Tasks themselves are quite flexible. You can add steps to a Task, and they’ll appear as subtasks beneath the Task, in the order you designate. Clicking on a Task gives you its context menu, from which you can click ‘+ Add step’ to add text describing the first step. Pressing Enter or clicking ‘+ Next step’ will give you a next step, and once you have two or more steps, you can drag them atop and between one another to set the order of completion. The three-vertical-dot context menu on the right allows you to toggle Importance, Mark Complete, Promote to Task, or Delete for each step.

Back on the List on which it appears, To Do dutifully keeps track of how many steps, how many completed steps, and any due date. Clicking on the Task once again returns you to the context menu, where you can mark steps complete, and use any of the provided tools to change your Task.

Next, we’ll tackle what else you can do with Lists and Tasks: sharing (Lists, Tasks), adding Notes, and other flexes of To Do with Office/Outlook.

Happy Doing!