Crabby Office Lady

Keeping track of every little thing you need to follow up on or actually do can be a time-consuming and not always successful endeavor. Try Outlook.

When you were a kid, your parents probably gave you chores to do. Maybe you had to mow the lawn, clean your room, wash the dinner dishes, or pull weeds in the yard. Maybe you received a monetary allowance for completing the jobs and maybe not. Maybe your only reward was that your parents let you live after the hell you put them through during adolescence.

Now that you're all grown up and perhaps have kids of your own you can boss around, you still have chores to do. No one ever said life was fair, honey.

A tisket, a tasket, a task is in your basket

What is a "tisket?" (For that matter, what is a "tasket?") I really don't know. If Ella Fitzgerald were still around, I'd write to her and ask since her signature song mentioned these. But never mind; this song provided me a snappy headline. Now, on to Outlook tasks!

In Outlook, a task is a personal or work-related item you want to track through completion. You can make it occur once or repeatedly (a "recurring" task it's called, strangely enough), you can set it up so that it reminds you to do something about it, and you can even assign tasks to other people.

 Note   A little advice on this last one: only assign a task to people with their permission and then do so gently. Some folks don't like being told what to do and when to do it. Go figure.

Here are some examples of how people are using Outlook tasks:

• I use Outlook tasks to track various things for my columns: when they're due to editing, who I need to contact as a technical reviewer, which already-published ones had mistakes that my eagle-eyed readers found and that I now need to change and then officially eat crow.
• Jessica down the hall told me that if she has something on her plate that she know she needs to follow up on in the far future (trip to Hawaii, laser hair removal, employee reviews), she'll just stick it on the task list, assign a reminder, and forget about it. She said that she pretty much uses tasks as a to-do list.
• Kevin, my editor, takes a fuming and frantic e-mail message he gets from me and drags it to the task list to deal with later. Outlook automatically creates a task for him, and he can set it up so that a reminder pops up later to warn him to address the issue before I come stomping down the hall.

There are a few ways you can create a task while you're working in Outlook. I've divided them up into two methods: by hand or by using an existing Outlook item.

Create a task by hand

• In Outlook 2003, press CTRL+4 to go to the tasks list and then enter all the details (by hand).
• In Outlook 2003, 2002, and 2000, on the File menu, point to New and click Task. Then enter all the details (by hand).
• In Outlook 2003, 2002, and 2000, press CTRL+SHIFT+K to open a new task. Again, enter the details (by hand).

 Note   If you want to create tasks by hand and enter all the details by hand, be my guest. But if you really want to save time and get everything accomplished, keep reading.

Create a task from an existing Outlook item

You can use the old drag-and-drop to create a task. Neat-o. Read, learn, and try.

1. If you want to create a task from a message or a calendar item (such as an appointment):
   • In Outlook 2003, just drag the message or item you want to convert to the Tasks button on the Navigation pane. (If the Navigation pane isn't showing up in the lower left of your Outlook window, on the View menu, click Navigation Pane.)
   • In Outlook 2002 and 2000, drag the message or item you want to convert to the Tasks button on the Outlook bar. (If the Outlook bar isn't showing up in the left pane of your Outlook window, on the View menu, click Outlook Bar.)
2. Once the task opens, on the Task and Details tabs, select the options you want.

You can also create a task from a calendar item using the same method.

Now that you know how to do that, there is one little trick within that trick that was revealed to me by my manager, Janet, who was so excited about it that she nearly fell off her John Fluevogs in her haste to demo it for me.

1. Right-click the message or calendar item before you drag it to the Tasks folder.
2. When you drop it, make your choice:
   • Copy Here as Task with Text  If you want to take a message, turn it into a task, have its contents show up right in the body of the task, and still keep it as a message in your Inbox too, this choice is for you.
   • Copy Here as Task with Attachment  This is similar to the choice above: you can take a message (or any Outlook item), create a task from it, and still keep it in its original place (calendar, Inbox, whatever). However, with this choice, the item you're copying will show up as an attachment in the newly created task.
   • Move Here as Task with Attachment  Your task will no longer appear as an Outlook item anyplace except on this task list (hence the word "move"), and it will come as an attachment. If you like to clean and sweep as you go and you don't need to keep the original item in its original spot, moving an item might be the ticket.

It's all about choices, isn't it?

When programs talk to each other

Perhaps you've peered into the depths of your wine cave and decided that the time has come to end the nightmare and finally acquire a bottle of Chateau Le Pin (from the Pomerol plateau, of course). Me, I have no cave. I do, however, often find myself confronted with a fridge full of expired cottage cheese that needs to go. Wouldn't it be magnifique if once you made a mental note of your desire to be fulfilled, a task would automatically be created in Outlook, waiting for you to complete it?

Relax, Futureboy, that's a ways off. Can you even begin to imagine the privacy issues surrounding that? However, there is a way to create a task for yourself when Outlook is as far from your mind as it can be.

Imagine this: you're in a meeting. You're furiously scribbling notes on your Tablet PC using OneNote. Or perhaps you don't have a Tablet PC and you're intently typing notes on your laptop using OneNote. Or perhaps you don't have a laptop and you're lazily doodling notes onto your hand.

For those of you doing one of the first two scenarios mentioned above, check out this little nugget of magic:

1. Select something you've scribbled or typed into OneNote that you want to turn into a task.
2. On the Standard toolbar click the Create Outlook Task button.
3. On the Task or Details tab, select the options you want.

As you can see, OneNote isn't reading your mind; it just feels that way. For those of you still using your hand, for heaven's sake, clean up your act and download the OneNote 2007 trial.

Tasks, schmasks: Other ways to stay organized

Now we all know that you can use Outlook tasks to organize your chores. But since we humans are a capricious and freedom-loving species, some us don't want to be bound to always having to use Outlook tasks. Some people use other methods to make sure their to-do lists get done. Here are how some of my coworkers make sure that they keep both their work and home lives running smoothly. Variety is, after all, the spice o' life (and I like mine spicy!).

• Joannie sets up a recurring meeting, sets a reminder for it, and marks the time as free. When that particular time comes for her to pay the monthly bills or buy a new hat, the Outlook reminder window pops up and she can either drop whatever she's doing and address it or set up the snooze alarm until she's good and ready to complete the task at hand. Not all scheduled appointments have to be either official or officious. Schedule yourself a little time for you!
• Roxanne told me that when something lands in her Inbox that she knows she needs to follow up on, she clicks it to put a follow-up flag on it, and assigns a "Due by" date to it. Then, in her Inbox, she adds the "Due by" column to the view so that she can sort by due dates. Things that were due in the past (oopsie!) are red. (That "oopsie" is so Roxanne.)
  
  I'd like to add that if you're using Outlook 2003, items you add a message flag to will automatically display in the For Follow Up Search Folder.
• Steve flat-out told me that he doesn't use tasks. He said that after doing an in-depth analysis of his task-management strategy (he's a program manager; they talk like that), he found that one of the problems was having multiple lists of tasks (tasks, e-mail, ad-hoc lists). He figured out a method to use e-mail exclusively (e-mail messages being just tasks in disguise), and flag messages — his own and others’ — for review.
  
  Steve also schedules a half-hour meeting at the end of every day to deal with these flagged messages. He told me that if he can't deal with these irritants in 10 minutes, he'll drag their sorry behinds to next day's calendar.

More than one way to skin a cat

Whether you use Outlook tasks from within Outlook or OneNote, create appointments with reminders for yourself, or use the handy flag feature, Outlook has a few different ways to make sure your to-do list gets to-done. Now get to-busy.

"All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you." — Thomas Carlyle

About the author

Annik Stahl, the Crabby Office Lady columnist, takes all of your complaints, compliments, and knee-jerk reactions to heart. Therefore, she graciously asks that you let her know whether this column was useful to you — or not — by entering your feedback using the Was this information helpful? tool below. And remember: If you don't vote, you can't complain.