We all have different ways to remind ourselves (and others) of things we (and they) need to do. In Outlook, we could create a task, something we needed to do.
In the Microsoft 365 world, personal tasks are now things we need to assign in the To Do app. In Groups or Teams, tasks are Tasks.
This post describes the difference between To Do and Tasks, and how and why Tasks has become a bit confusing.
Outlook tasks become (things) To Do
For a long time, it was possible to create and assign tasks in the calendar part of email. You could assign tasks to others.
In mid 2015, Microsoft acquired 6Wunderkinder. That company’s primary offering was the ‘to do’ app called Wunderlist.
In early 2020, Microsoft released the ‘To Do’ app, built on Wunderlist. This CNET article that describes alternatives to Wunderlist includes information about the new Microsoft ‘To Do’ app.
Unlike Tasks, To Do items are essentially a personal list of things to do that is accessed from the separate To Do section of Outlook. They are not included in the calendar.
There are two ways to create a new item in the To Do list. The first is to click on the ‘My Day’ option in Outlook and then add a task in the To Do section.
The second is to click on the ‘To Do’ option at the bottom left of the Outlook app, which will open the ‘My Day’ section and allow a new (To Do) task to be created.
A bit confusingly, the Planned section of ‘To Do’ displays tasks that are:
- Personal tasks, created as an Outlook calendar tasks but which don’t appear in the individual’s Outlook calendar, only in the To Do calendar.
- Assigned to the individual from a Microsoft 365 Group or Team (including ‘Tasks by Planner’).
The difference between the two can be seen below; the first two are personal tasks from To Do, the second two are Group/Team-based tasks. The ‘Assigned to you’ items are the second two under ‘Later’. Note that the Planned section does not include any simple, non-calendar-based, ‘To Do’ items.
Planner
Microsoft announced the Office 365 service called Planner in September 2015.
Planner is a task-based service originally linked directly with Office 365 Groups (announced in 2014 ‘Delivering the first chapter of Office 365 Groups‘). It was described as ‘a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork’ within a team – which meant initially an Office 365 Group. It seemed that Microsoft’s vision was to move the creation of Tasks away from Outlook to Planner.
Initially, when a new Office 365 Group was created (including when a new Team was created in MS Teams), it created a Plan. This connection was later removed and so a new Group or Team no longer creates a new Plan.
The following is an example of an empty plan for an Office 365 Group called ‘SharePoint Admin Group’. All the members of the Group (or Team if one exists) would have access to the plan. Plans contain ‘buckets’ or groupings of tasks. The default bucket is ‘To do’ which, in the example below contains a single task ‘Create two new tasks’ (which is outstanding) A separate bucket was created named ‘New Sites’, and it has one completed task.
Changes to Planner
Several changes happened with Planner since 2018:
- New Office 365 Groups and Teams did not automatically create a Plan.
- Multiple plans could be created for every Office 365 Group or Team.
- Tasks by Planner was introduced to Teams (see below) so that every channel can use either the ‘parent’ Office 365 Group Plan or create a new one.
These changes have created some confusing content in the Planner app.
Microsoft announced in April 2020 that Planner would be renamed Tasks (it is still named Planner a year later).
As noted in the link (by onmsft.com), ‘… the change means that Teams users will soon be able to see their individual tasks and team tasks in a single app from across Teams channels, Planner and Outlook. For mobile users, the change also means that both a list view and a new mobile tasks experience will soon be available in within the Teams app.’
The new Tasks by Planner and To Do was visible from Teams in early 2021 but the relationship between Outlook To Do tasks and Planner Tasks via Teams remained a bit confusing.
When a Team channel is opened, the ‘Tasks by Planner and To Do’ can be added as a tab.
When ‘Tasks by Planner and To Do’ is selected, two options are visible and this is where some of the confusion starts.
Most people are likely to simply click ‘Save’, which creates a ‘Tasks’ tab in the channel and a new Plan. Ideally, they should use an existing plan, if it exists (which it probably won’t – as a result, multiple Plans may be created for each Team and channel.
This is how the new Tasks tab looks like in the Team:
Perhaps it doesn’t matter (for some organisations) how many Plans or Tasks that are set up.
We can now see there are three Plans for the SharePoint Admin Group Team, two in the same (General) channel. The end user can also see tasks that were assigned to him/her. If they click on the ‘Tasks’ option they will see the list of personal calendar- and To Do-based tasks as we saw above in Outlook:
Behind the scenes, in Planner, we can see four plans for the SharePoint Admin Group. Three of these map to the three above, but not the one titled ‘Tasks – SharePoint Admin Group’ which has two completed tasks. But where is it?
Here are the two completed tasks in SharePoint Admin Group ‘Tasks’ plan that don’t exist in the main SharePoint Admin Group Plan, or the other two.
Where are these two completed tasks?
Or, more specifically, why do they not appear in many of the Teams Tasks tabs? There are no private channels in this Team, so I know it’s not hidden in one – and, in any case, you cannot create a new Task list in a private channel.
Just to try to work this out, I created a new Task in that list of Tasks, assigned it to myself. The only place I could find it was in both Teams and Outlook in the ‘Assigned to you’ area.
Summing up
Tasks, either to remind yourself of things you need to do, or what others need to do, are probably good for specific purposes or Teams. But the ability to create multiple Task lists in Teams channels is just going to create more and more confusion.
But it’s confusing and will likely result in multiple random Tasks/Plans in Planner, even for the same channel.
- Information Management
- Microsoft 365
- Planner
- Tasks
