![]() The due date is the main attribute of any task, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using ToDo in a business or a personal environment (I use it in both). Which is a shame, because these are only a few, easily fixable issues, preventing it from becoming a great tool. And it is clear, given the age of complaints on UserVoice, that MS is going to just let these problems linger until they eventually kill off the app or stop most development because the users are - surprisingly - not adapting it widely enough. It is clear that whomever made design direction decisions for this app had no real life task management experience, and little common sense. I, and most colleagues that I know, plan our days the evening before, and our weeks on Sundays. Most PMs, or other busy professionals, don’t have the time to leisurely plan their day in the morning - there are meetings to attend, issues to address, the inbox is already exploding by the time you get out of the car. Except, it can only be planned on the morning of the same day, and then it disappears at midnight. (The lack of integration with MS other services is a common thing). So, if you collaborate with many teams and not everyone is using ToDo, you can’t use steps. Or any other service / program / app except ToDo. Except, they don’t sync to MS’ own Outlook. So, the tag feature, while neat, is mainly useless. This has been an ongoing complaint for many years now, and a 3rd party developer maintaining their app in free time after regular work hours would have fixed it within days. I need to know if there are any deadlines coming up in the nearest future, and when there are dozens of tasks in the search results, it’s very hard to get a good picture when they are not arranged by due date. When I plan my project, I must know when something is Due, not when it was created. Out of all task attributes, someone decided to pick the one that’s arguably the most useless, and make it the default sorting method, with no way for the user to change this. Except, the tags - and the search results - are sorted by. This would be a fantastic feature, easy to automate using something like Texter, and extremely useful. So, this could be a perfect solution, right ? Except, in a typical Microsoft fashion, all these great features are hindered by poor execution, inexplicable and bad design choices, and years of neglect.įirst, #tags. With MS Outlook at the base, at least, assigning tasks, adding attachments, flagging emails, and creating tasks in OneNote 2016 all work without hoop jumping. This is huge because Exchange is still one of the most common business platforms, and many companies either completely forbid hosting proprietary info on 3rd party services, or don’t allow installation of programs and sync conduits, and even when they do, collaborating using 3rd party tools that no other people use is not straightforward. Second, it is MS native and (mostly) uses Outlook tasks. web and mobile) and non-existent or limited on others. One of the biggest gripes I had with most 3rd party tools was that they were great on some platforms (e.g. First and foremost, it is cross platform, and offers a more or less consistent user experience on all platforms, including web. ![]() The “Keep it as simple as needed, but not simpler” principle. ![]() Over the years, I’ve slowly moved from all encompassing complex solutions to the “simple is better” ones. I have many years of experience in engineering and project management, and I had used many, many different task management services. ![]()
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