If grocery shopping and vacation plans are tasks you prefer to do with help from a partner, Microsoft To Do has you covered.
To Do attaches to your Outlook/OneDrive profile, and identifies you by your Microsoft account email.
To make a Task List shareable, it must first Not be a Smart List. Lists such as My Day, Important, and Assigned to Me are unshareable, meant only for the person using this instance of MS To Do.
Any lists you create, however, can be shared.
To make a list that you can share, shareable, first you’ll right click on it in the left margin to produce the List menu:
Selecting ‘Share list’ will enable sharing for the list, and produce a dialog box where you can invite your sharemate via email or through copying the link and pasting it to a chat app, etc.:
Once you have invited your partner, their acceptance of that invite grants them read, write, and reshare access to that list only. You’ll need to repeat this for each list you want to share with each partner.
Lists you’ve enabled sharing on will appear in your Lists (beneath the Smart Lists) with the two-person Sharing icon, whether or not any partner accepted your invite.
Finally, you can use the ‘Manage access’ button to limit access to a list to the current members, to add and remove existing share partners from a List, and to ‘Stop sharing’ altogether.
Invitation link is obscured in this image, but you get the idea.
Right-clicking the list once you’ve enabled Sharing gives you the same right-click menu as before, except that ‘Share list’ is now ‘Sharing options’. It still takes you to the same menu.
Recurring Lists, for things like Grocery Shopping, can be useful in the store. If you split up to get different items, you can each keep track in quasi-real time which items on the list you find. No one needs pen and paper, and you don’t need to track your partner down to see if they picked up coffee, for example.
We hope this was helpful, and that you enjoy using To Do to keep track of what you… Do.
Hello again. I recently got laid off from a position I was trying to make work for myself as a Business Intelligence Analyst. Once the manager who hired me, himself left the company 3-4 months into my position, the time budget to train me on a legacy accounting system dwindled to 5 minutes question time two out of every three days as the talented professional training me was then promoted to the whole other job of running IT.
I struggled with how the inventory part of the system worked, took extra time to get acclimated, and then the axe fell just as I was beginning to understand it. I’ve been fired before, the first time when I was weeding flowers (slowly in the afternoon, after blowing away everyone in the morning) at Lew’s Nursery, age 13.
This wasn’t that.
They needed more than what I was originally hired for; they said so at my exit interview. (I probably should have faced that down earlier and looked for an exit.) No hard feelings, either way. Seriously – my trainer/manager has offered to speak on my behalf as a reference.
It wasn’t convenient; it never is. It begins another gap in the experience on my CV, hopefully short. But I learned SO much. It even improved my writing.
The most poignant thing I think I learned (in a professional context) was, TL:DR is real. Just because you can write much, doesn’t mean you always should.
Part of my old job involved walking the production floor every morning and making sure the monitoring was right. Problems were usually some form of wrong selection on the console at any line. I would take note, which line, which job, which problem, and report that to a list of managers and executives. They’d eventually clear up, and I’d release a day or two of “no anomalies detected” reports, and then it would happen again.
In my first reports, I used to try to explain what had gone wrong. That got corrected almost immediately; nobody needed my take on that! I stopped reporting minutiae like minor quibbles in actual headcount, and sticking to correctible things like ending the clock before you go home.
My new brevity was complimented, rewarded, and reacted to, positively.
Nextly, use your existing data to check yourself. That applies not only to matching figures, such as on an Excel sheet, but also to the history, the truth and the circumstances you’ve encountered around you. Past is prologue and precedent, to misuse a quote, but it is, even for technical problems and common errors.
On the reporting side, I’d need to start by tuning a SQL query so that it matched the numbers out of the accounting system, being presented the accounting system’s way to the 4 people the accounting system had authorized. This involved such devices as selecting, SUMming or AVGing a particular field, sometimes out of two or three options of similar columns that Could Be the right one. The PDF copy of the proprietary data dictionary was appreciated greatly, but not as good as someone else’s prior knowledge to help you.
So when I’d nailed the numbers and understood my subject, I wanted to save that for always and forever. I might get peeled off to another subject area on my next project, only to come back to the original area weeks or even months later. My SQL Server directory in Documents on OneDrive grew to 50, then 100 queries, with long, descriptive titles, so that I could keep track of them from File Manager windows.
For writing, that is also true. Things you’ve explained before, even if you have to tweak them for modernity, still have value. You might need something you wrote very well a while ago for a similar problem. So, save your work. Since you want your best work in a shareable version, you can remove the proprietary information, but the thoughts, and the words came from you, and they demonstrate your talent as a writer. So, you should use them.
I have scripts and articles I wrote and then recorded for a help system at the job before this last one. Since they belong to the company, and that departure was abrupt, I can’t access them. But they are still my best work in Technical Writing, for now. I have a glowing blurb of reference from my then-manager about those, but it’s not the same.
I may try to recreate something like that in Loom.
I left this last job at its root because there wasn’t real training and very little help in the moment to do it, but I’ll also admit to being discouraged by the lack of help to the point I didn’t always ask for it, especially when I got stuck.
I’m not a SQL DBA, but if I’m not careful, what I was allowed to do could break replication, if I made some stupid mistake like failing to properly temp my tables before inserting, etc. That brought the wrong kind of attention, and then often extra restorative work that precluded discussing any query issue for the time being.
To mitigate the times when I got stuck, I would step away from the problem, and attempt to flush my mind by catching up on email or reading an article on a different topic. Frequently, I successfully re-engaged and solved the problem, but this also got flagged as inactivity when the wrong people saw it. I explained what I was doing, but it brought unnecessary friction to any prospect of the training process, and required extra understanding from my manager.
Don’t make my mistake: Always ask for help when you need it. Whenever you need it. If a helper cannot get to you now, usually they’ll either route you to one who can, or they’ll set a schedule. My manager would often have me work on another project until he could get 15 minutes to dive into the issue on this one. It’s expected you won’t know everything, every time.
People like me forget that sometimes and get nervous to bother someone, and all of us need to stop.
But I certainly can write a PIVOT query and APPLY aggregate functions to single rows, now. I got that going for me.
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, the Windows app. Configuration my own.
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.
Outlook, completing your sentences, like the soulmate you’ve always wanted your computer to be.
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.
Task with Steps
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.
Having installed Microsoft’s version of the To Do application, the next thing I did (even before reading any documentation) was to pour tasks into it from my latest paper notebook of important stuff. That might have been an… overexuberance.
But for years, that’s how I worked before I got To Do. I’d buy a new spiral college-ruled notebook (if I’d run through the previous one) and painstakingly transcribe unfinished tasks from the latest (as far as I knew) list to a new one, along with notes like phone numbers, addresses, prerequisites, etc. I usually write in manuscript, and I like how it looks. I could even take the notebook with me in the car, unlike my desktop computer.
Would suggest you shred pages like these and get on To Do.
Still, if I needed to remember a date or set a reminder, of course that had to be on the computer. I went years this way, living the dichotomy of analog tasks and digital calendar and it worked, mostly, but I was looking for better economy of effort.
My history of selecting the right app to keep a schedule, organize my tasks, and make sure my life is (mostly) on time had been long, and largely unfruitful. It started with Outlook Calendar, which left consideration because once upon a time I had to hook up the application to a business email (or run Active Directory from the house) to use the app. OneNote wasn’t the purposed Microsoft app for what I wanted to do, however much I envisioned it to be (and frankly, how cool it is — if Microsoft doesn’t completely overhaul it).
Google Tools were promising, but my Gmail was overrun by newsletters and spam, and I’d otherwise have to find a way to use my Outlook email to generate Google Calendar tasks. Whether by my own idiosyncrasy, or for real IT reasons, I wasn’t finding my sweet spot – until now.
Microsoft To Do came midway through a time of intense, seemingly endless process in my life, and I could access it on my own terms, within a process that worked. I still keep my notebooks, but even then you can print specific tasks with steps and notes, much less lists, if you need paper to tote around.
My one tip at the end of Part Two is your reward for having gotten this far. In Windows 10/11, locate your Startup Apps in Settings. Make sure this is set to go:
It’ll save you from having to remember to go find it, and start it, and work in it, EVERY TIME.
We’ve all seen it – “Please ignore any friend requests from me – I’ve been hacked!!”, then several sad and angry emojis, then friends chiming in over time, commenting “yeah, I got one (a duplicate friend request from ‘you’), too.” It happens to too many people, most of them perceived as senior on social media, but it can be anybody who’s not on the service full-time.
Facebook is the common place to see sketchy people (or bots) spoofing your friends, but it’s on Instagram, Twitter, and just about anywhere else, and happening to anyone. A victim may not even have an original account on the platform where the spoofing takes place.
So, technically, you/they didn’t get hacked, but spoofed. The good news is, it usually can be taken down, with a little help from friends.
First, let’s understand what happened. The offending act follows a simple and nefarious formula:
1. The impostor copied the victim’s public profile picture, public bio information, and sometimes cover picture to a new Facebook profile that the impostor set up under the victim’s name, with a spare character to distinguish the fake account from the true account.
2. The very next step that happens is, commonly, for the impostor to block the victim’s original account from this new profile. This prevents the victim from going out to the original friends list and calling the impostor out (or posting to that effect) to stop the scam, since the victim can’t see it.
3. Once all that’s set up, the offender will look through the victim’s friends list, and start attempting to connect with the friends on that list anew – the victim’s friends will notice this first. If called on it, the offender (impersonating the victim) will protest that (s)he forgot the original password, or was just feeling creative and wanted to do another one. If the friend is showing as sufficiently gullible, the impostor account may then appear in your Messenger chatstream, saying they’re stranded/in trouble somewhere, and, could you be a dear and Paypal/Venmo/Zelle them some money? If they’re nasty, they’ll post a link to malware impersonating you, with a phishing message.
Maybe money, grief, or malware isn’t the end result. But if this is you, you’ll still have wasted time and energy on a random scammer, impersonating your friend.
So, you can grow annoyed at the constant cycles of this on your timeline, like I once did, or you can get to work to make them go away, like a friend would do.
1. When you see this post on your timeline, or you receive the ‘duplicate’ friend request, your first impulse (and your friend’s fervent wish) is to reject or ignore it. So instead of accepting, or leaving it there to scam the next person, enter the name into Facebook search.
2. If you searched, you’ll see two accounts with the same picture, one of which (the original) appears with Friend underneath it as you are already friends. The one with friend request pending, or nothing if you already rejected it, is the one to report.
3. From the ellipse (…) menu, click on Report, then “for Impersonating”, “Someone Else”, and finally type or select the name of your friend.
Getting the account removed sometimes only takes one well-documented report – Facebook admins spend a lot of time ferreting out these types of attacks, and you filling out the ‘paperwork’ is a real help in this regard. It takes at most, two or three reports for a Facebook moderator to pull the plug on a real impostor.
Still, your five minutes of effort, even magnified by millions of real friends doing the right thing for real victims, may not equal the output for even the smallest of bot farms, but it’s the first line of defense for the people who clean this up for a living, and it’s a true good deed in the here and now.
You’ve saved somebody else the aggravation of tracking this down, and you hopefully don’t have to hear (from that friend, anyway) about how they’ve been “hacked.” It’s worth consideration to not always be coming to the rescue, as habitual de-scammers get known, and maybe impersonated (and then auto-blocked) themselves. But your family members and close friends are usually worth looking out for when it happens, every so often.
___
I’ve sent this article out almost six times, revising it half as much. It started out as something I wrote for my mother after she was gettingspoofed regularly along with her friends.
I’ve been looking to organize and process the complex and salient aspects of my life – house move, driver’s license conversion, address changes, CAREER CHANGE, etc. I started big – somewhere there’s a Jira instance with one task on it, I checked into ScrumMaster certification, I think I explored the project-based features of GitLab (it sure worked when I was a software developer). None of that did the trick – I’m not a project manager, Scrum of me and my cat isn’t it, and all of that is too much software to do what amounts to… making and using lists of things to do.
Yesterday I tore across the hallway for no apparent reason, today I’m going to sleep on your keyboard, and my only blocker is I want food, now.
Dejected, I e-trudged into Microsoft Store, resigned to pull some ad-bloated app maybe I could have written myself at one time, and typed: to do.
All hail the monopoly.
If Microsoft makes it, I know it’s going to be QA’ed to death. It’s going to have ever-growing features that make sense to people who use the app, and you’re going to get comprehensive notes about how to use it.
Five Dollar Nassau 