The Microsoft productivity suite has seen significant integration improvements over the last year or two. The institution I work at uses Office365, so to reduce friction, I have been making the jump from the stack of third-party tools I have using for some time to their Microsoft equivalents. Two of the essential tools I use to manage my work and keep my email controlled is Microsoft’s Calendar and To Do apps. To Do is a simple app but its best feature is its ability to create tasks from emails by merely dragging them into the ‘My Day’ pannel., that email is then easily accessed from that task later.
Now I am used to managing my on tasks with this new app, and I am getting the benefits, I want to extend this to my team but have found that it is not as simple as solo task management.
You have to:
- Create a sub-list
- Share a web link to this sub-list
- Assign tasks to members of the sub-list (only once that person has accessed the sub-list via the link)
It would be much easier if you could use the institution’s Active Directory to assign any task in any list, or a whole sub-list, to someone else, but this may come shortly.
To start with, I have created and shared a task list for each of my direct reports but moving forward, once the habit has been established, it will make more sense to have a shared list per project and include all members of the broader team in the relevant project task lists too.
You can find guides on sharing tasks and everything else on the Microsoft To Do support pages.
Get in touch with me on Twitter if you are using O365 and have tips or have any questions.
SamuelJTanner 