Tasks and Time Management in Outlook

How did we get here?

In our research for Outlook 12, we* found that less than 30 percent of Outlook users use the Tasks portion of Outlook, despite the fact that during site visits, we saw that people desperately needed help organizing the action items they need to do. From our site visits, we found that people didn’t use Tasks in Outlook because a) inputting tasks was too hard, b) Tasks were hidden in a part of Outlook that few people visit, and c) the implementation of Tasks in Outlook did not provide a useful enough experience to compel users to visit it.

We then did research to figure out how to modify Outlook in order to help people to be more effective at managing their time. We looked at many different time management systems, including Getting Things Done by David Allen, Take Back Your Life! By Sally McGhee and her Microsoft training course, Managing Actions, The Organized Executive by Stephanie Winston, the Franklin Covey/Quest model, Time Management from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern, among others.  What we found were some common themes:

1. Create lists of things to do and remember
2. Do tasks during scheduled time; set deadlines
3. Organize by project
4. Merge everything into one list

Several time management systems suggested ways to use Outlook’s existing time management system, but they seemed hampered, rather than helped by the technology. Thus, we tried to work out these problems by introducing the following four major feature areas:

1. Easier task input
   1. Flagging: We modified flagging to make it date-based and in some sense, to force the question: “when am I going to get to this?”
   2. Task Input Panel: We wanted to give people an easy, always-visible place to input tasks by typing a single line of text. Giving people a simple way to get tasks into the system helps people create lists of things to do and remember – instead of keeping it in their heads.
2. To-Do Bar (lightweight task management): We wanted to provide people with a way to see their upcoming tasks and appointments without switching context to a heavyweight task manager. To merge everything into one list, we made the task list in the To-Do Bar include flagged items and tasks. We also encouraged other Office applications to make task creation easier and they did – OneNote now has flagging that creates tasks in Outlook (OneNote 2003 had Outlook task creation, but now it is even simpler), Project now creates tasks in Outlook, and downloaded SharePoint task lists automatically appear in the To-Do Bar if they are assigned to you.
3. Tasks on the Calendar (time-based task management): We wanted to provide people with a way to easily schedule their tasks and look back on their calendar to see the full spectrum of what they had accomplished – with both tasks and appointments. To achieve this, we added the Daily Task List below the Calendar in weekly and daily views. Dragging a task from the Daily Task List onto the Calendar automatically schedules an half hour appointment to do that task.
4. Categories: We also modified categories, giving them color, and made them available on almost all item types (mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes.) The hope is that people will use categories to organize their tasks by project, but with categories, we retained a great deal of flexibility; categories can be used any way one chooses.

-Melissa

 *I am using “we” in this post because I am not alone in doing the research for the time management system in Outlook 12. All of the credit goes to Hank Leukart, Jeff Smith, Glenn Frankel and others on the Office team.