Tips For Task Management Across Microsoft 365

• My Day: At its core, To Do is a set of lists, the most powerful of which is My Day. Your My Day list streamlines competing tasks so you can zero-in on what’s most important today. You can manually add tasks to My Day, import tasks from other To Do lists, or select the lightbulb icon for task suggestions. Those suggestions come from other lists and are based on task due dates, helping you consolidate what’s immediately important in one list. The My Day list resets each day, so anything you don’t finish today will reappear tomorrow.
• Hashtags: Hashtags in To Do act a lot like hashtags on social media, helping you quickly find similar tasks across different lists. Consider using hashtags like #travel to plan multiple upcoming trips—one in your “Friends” list and the other in your “Family” list—or for the name of a work project that affects different departments. You can use hashtags in the task name, steps, or notes field and quickly find any instance by typing it in the Search bar.
• Assigned to you: If you and your teams use Planner, all your individually assigned tasks will also appear in the “Assigned to you” list in To Do. That list syncs to Planner and vice versa, so you can actively manage your assignments in either app.

• Multiple views: The Gantt chart view in Project is now joined by two more views—Grid and Board—giving you the flexibility to work the way you want. The Grid view presents all your project tasks in a table, with the option to add whichever detail columns you’d like. If you’re a Planner user, the Board view will look very familiar, with each task presented as a card and organized into buckets. Finally, the Timeline view—that’s the Gantt chart—sets your tasks as bars on a timeline, helping you visualize task start dates, finish dates, and duration throughout the lifetime of a project. All three views are also available in Teams and sync in real-time, so you can flip between each as the project calls for different management styles.
• Subtasks: Subtasks let you break complex Project phases into a bunch of smaller, more manageable tasks. Once you’ve determined your project phases and their subtasks, add them all as tasks to Project—the subtasks should go under their associated phases—select the subtask ellipses, and choose “Make subtask.” This will indent each subtask under the phase (or parent task), giving you a visual cue in the Grid and Timeline views of the task hierarchy. (Note, you cannot add subtasks from the Board view.) Project automatically completes the parent task once all its subtasks are finished, and you can always promote subtasks to parent tasks (or create subtasks under other subtasks) as your project evolves. 
• Dependent tasks: Like subtasks, dependent tasks help ensure every step in a process gets completed. The difference is, subtasks can start at any time and, from a Project perspective, are all the same priority. Conversely, dependent tasks must start after their parent task (or predecessor) is completed, and there is a clear order of when each task must be done. When you add a dependent task Project automatically sets its start date for one day after its predecessor. If you need to update the start date, finish date, or duration of the predecessor, the dynamic scheduling engine automatically changes the dependent task details accordingly.

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• Flagged email: Flagged emails have long helped Outlook users prioritize their inbox; now, those same flagged messages are also added as To Do tasks in Outlook for the web. First, navigate to “Settings” in To Do and turn on the “Flagged email” list. Then, to flag an email, select the flag icon that appears when you hover your cursor over an email in Outlook for the web. Flagged emails will now appear as tasks in To Do, where you can edit them, add them to My Day, and open the original email. You can also mark the task as important by selecting the star icon, which will add that task to your “Important” list in To Do. Just note, if you delete a flagged email, the associated task will disappear from To Do too.
• Create tasks from email content: You can also create a To Do task based on the contents of an email message. In Outlook for the web, select the text that you’d like to convert to a task and choose the resulting checkmark (the To Do icon). Your new task will automatically open in the To Do pane to the right of your email, where you can quickly edit it. Select “Manage all tasks” at the bottom for more editing options. Unlike flagged emails, tasks created based on the contents of an email message are not lost if the original email is deleted.
• Cortana: Cortana can also help you create, manage, and add reminders and tasks to your To Do lists. But first, you’ll need to add your Outlook or Microsoft 365 account as a connected service to Cortana. (Select the “Cortana” hyperlink to learn how.) Then, it’s as simple as opening Cortana and saying or typing, “Create a list.” Cortana will ask what you want to call the list and the items you want to add. When you’re finished, Cortana will automatically save your changes, which can be edited in To Do at any time on any device.

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• @mentions: In Word or Excel for the web, you can use @mentions to assign and track tasks. To start, @mention the person (or people) in a comment who you’d like to assign the task. This will bring up the option to assign that comment as a task. Select the “Assign to” checkbox and post your comment. The assignee will receive an email notification about the task and can officially complete it by checking the “Resolve task” circle in the comment. Like regular comments, task assignments from @mentions can be reopened once resolved and deleted outright. You can also reassign the task by using an @mention in the comment response and selecting the “Reassign to” checkbox.