Microsoft Planner Basics: Streamline Projects, Manage Teams & People Boost Productivity | Randy Dean

Hi everybody, Randall F. Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. Hey, happy new year. It's 2025 now. And with the new year comes a new tool for me. I, every year over the holidays, I like to go in and take a look at the different new tools that are available both at Microsoft and with Google Workspace. And, um, see if there's one I can pick up. And this year's was Planner, as you can see on the screen behind me. Uh, what I've done here is, um, I've actually played around with this over the holidays to the point that it's gonna probably make the biggest single change to how I've been managing my project and task list for maybe the last 20 years. No jokes. So let's get in. Let's talk about this. First, I just want to make myself a little smaller here so that I can show you some of the stuff inside here. The basic way that it works is you can have my day, my task, my plans, and then below this you'll see that I've created a set of pan— plans for Randall F. Dean. Randall Dean Consulting and Training. And these are my tasks for this. And the way Planner is constructed is you can create buckets. And as you can see with these buckets, you can basically page over. I've got streaming programs, YouTube, website marketing, PR, timely tips, some of my climate work. I'm trying to practice active gratitude this year. So I've got a few things in here that I might move into different locations because they might maybe a little bit more personal. Than they're related to my business. So I might make, you know, sort of a new category for this. But I just wanted to show you that these are how you can basically set up your projects, your activities, and your events. And if you want to add a new bucket, here's a project I'll be working on this year. Install new front porch. Yeah, we had something happen to our front porch last year, and so we're going to basically build over the top of it. And so as you can see, it's that easy. You just type in the bucket name that you'd like and then you can come down here and start adding tasks. Get measurements of concrete and add task. Another task is build a sketch of design and another one, etc., etc. You know, I could keep adding a bunch of tasks. I don't want to waste your time, but I want you to see how easy it is for you to add tasks. And now I mentioned that this is going to be the biggest change in how I manage my projects and tasks in the last number of years. Let me go and explain why real quick by popping into my Microsoft Outlook. So let's go into my Outlook and you'll notice it's in the to-do list next 7 days view. So as you can see, I've got a set of tasks that I'd like to get done today as I'm filming this video. Then here's some tasks starting with tomorrow and I'll go through the next 7 days. And what I was doing before Planner was putting everything in here. Everything. I was basically putting all of my tasks, project, activity, event, deadline, urgent, client, prospect, etc., all in here. And I've been using this for years and years and I've been using it pretty well. But I will be the first to admit that the one issue that a lot of people have when it comes to having an electronic task list is that it can sometimes get a bit overwhelming. Um, if you're putting everything in, especially putting in a lot of stuff from your emails, this list can grow really quick and it almost becomes its own distraction if you let it. And it also takes some time every day to administer it. And so what I did after looking at that structure of Planner, like I showed it to you a second ago, is I realized Hey, maybe I can take the stuff that's not so time-sensitive, urgent, critical, and instead put it in with my projects, activities, events in Planner. So I can see those things that don't have really hard deadlines and urgency in a more strategic view. And then reserve this list that I have in my Outlook which would be sort of comparable, by the way. Let's do this real quick. I'm going to open up To Do in the new Outlook. This would be sort of comparable to the planned list that you see right here. Okay, so as you can see, there's the planned list. And when you look at this, it's updating live as we show this, but Both of these, what I've decided to do now is make these task lists focused on my critical, important, urgent deadline stuff, including response activity items for my clients and prospects for my business. And then what I can do is reserve my more, um, what would you say, project strategic tasks and activities that are not as critically time sensitive for this tool. Because with this tool, I can look very quickly across all of my different projects, activities, events, and I can look down through any one of these lists. Uh, let's go over here to streaming programs. As you can see, there's several more. It goes off the first page. So I've got a bunch of tasks related to my streaming, streaming programs, but unless they have a hard deadline, I'm going to look at them in here and work at them from here. Once I get clear of my deadline urgent tasks each day. And I want to show you something else that's really cool about the Planner tool. Look at this one right here, fix thumbnail of video. Now I can open this thing up and you can see what I've done is I've created an assignment. I can actually delegate tasks from here also. This is how you do task delegation. Now, if you're moving into using new and web Outlook, you're going to probably want to start using Planner too, because this is how you can delegate your tasks. Uh, the assigned task capability is still in classic Outlook, but this is how I believe that they're expecting you to do task assignments moving into this new phase of the 365 tools. And all you have to do is click the little checkbox and then you can pick somebody. And so what I did on this one, just to show you, I made this an assigned task for today, um, and I assigned it to my Gmail entity of me. And so let's take a look at Gmail real quick. There it is. So as you can see, when you set these up in Planner, you can actually create assigned tasks also to help with delegation and tracking, and you can see those assignments here. And you can quickly send them to one of the people that's on your workgroup or team. So super handy. You know, one of the other things that I wanted to show you here while we're inside of this is let's click back out here to the main list. You know, as you can see with any one of these tasks, if you hover over it, you'll get your ellipses, your three dots. And, you know, if you watch any of my videos, I always tell you, if you see three dots, Or you see a waffle, click on it because there's good stuff hiding in there. See, like here, if I click on the waffle, I'm using the web version of Planner in my browser. If I click on the waffle, I can go in and launch all a whole bunch of my other Microsoft 365 apps that are connected to my professional 365 account. But what's really interesting is if you come down here and hover right here, you can label, assign, copy the task, move the task, delete. And when you open it by double-clicking on it, what you can do is you can add labels, you can change buckets, you can add and change priority, start date, due date if you want to do that kind of task planning, notes. So let's say you're— you decide you're going to create a task here that came from an email. What you could do is instead of turning it into a task using a drag-and-drop operation in either the classic Outlook or new web Outlook, instead what you would do is you just copy the whole thing into your clipboard, the whole message, come in here, drop it. Um, easy peasy, takes 2 seconds, and then you'd have all the information you need down here. You can even add attachments. You can even put in personal comments. What's interesting is in some of these, I have put several personal comments in here about do this before you do this when you do this. So that way, I'm keeping track of my own stuff, so to speak. And then, let's take this one level higher because one of the things that I do here every year over the holidays, to just sort of give you a feel of strategy, a higher level, every year over the holidays, I try to spend at least a bit of time building my own personal plan for the upcoming year. And I just did this process for 2025. And what I did, which is sort of interesting, is I actually created a note in my OneNote that I call Priorities 2025. And this is something I've been doing for years. I actually— this used to be page 1 of my planner way back in the early '90s. So I've been doing this for a while. And as you can see, what I've got is at the top, my goals for what it is I want to accomplish in the year. Here's my list of people. Hold that thought about people because I want to share something about Planner in a minute. Projects, activities, events. And then here are my projects. Now, what's really interesting, look at these projects: streaming programs, YouTube, Family College, marketing, PR, Climate ebook and podcast. So these are my major projects that I'd like to get done with 2025. Topline is the major project. And then below that are sort of my subprojects or tasks related to these main projects. And I do this every year so I can see a big picture of what it is I'm trying to accomplish. I try to review this at least once a week to make sure that I'm paying attention to these big picture items. And then what I used to teach is then make sure you've either got tasks in your Outlook Task Manager or items in your calendar related to the things in this big picture view so that you're always working on moving forward with those items. But now that I've got this Planner wrinkle that I've added in, take a look what I've done here. I have streaming programs, YouTube, website. See, a lot of these buckets are directly related to the buckets that I created in my planning document, my annual planning document. And so if I've designed this right, I don't have to go look at that list multiple times a week to remind myself what my most important stuff is. It is basically showing right here, which is super cool. So in essence, I'm able to be a little bit more strategic each and every day than maybe I was before when I was looking at this view instead. Because this view was a mix of everything. That view now is more dedicated toward, um, my project activity events that don't have hard deadlines. So I can reserve this one for more of my hard deadline and urgent stuff. And I think by doing this now, you're probably saying, well, wait, you got two task lists. Yes, but here what I'm doing. I have dual monitor workstation. Once I know I've got my email caught up and there's nothing on my calendar, I then switch to a two-screen setup with this urgent, important, critical task list on one screen and this on Screen 2. A little bit more strategic, a little bit less urgent, but I can see the whole thing at once. I'm going to say this, that's a single task list. If I can see it all at once and I can work on it all at once, that's a single task list according to views. But I have done it this way. Now, you don't have to do it this way. You could put your urgent stuff in here with all your due dates. And you could run this as your primary list, or you could keep doing everything in your Outlook task list, or listen to this crazy wrinkle. So I've got the Urgent view in my Outlook. There it is, time deadline based. Here is my Planner view with all of my buckets for all of my projects, activities, events, and all the sub tasks that are related to all of those items. And I told you that back in the early '90s, I used to use a planner, a paper-based tool. That paper-based tool would have my annual planning sheet, my related daily task list in paper, and my calendar, as well as, you know, contacts and notes in the back. I've actually gone back to using paper a little bit here. Look what I've created. Call it my hot list. And here's what I'm doing every day because I have the 2 task lists. Once I get down to where I'm at the 2 task lists and I'm looking at my tasks across the screens, I'm now creating a sheet of paper to help me focus in even more of items that are either on one or the other., and you'll notice I've circled 1, 2, 3, 4 things I really want to get done today. And so what happens is once I get down to this granular of a level, I can focus in really tight and get my work done. Now, I'm not saying you have to do any of the things that I've shared here. I want to share options with you of how you could better organize your work. And I mean, you know, you could even roll in you know, things like OneNote or Teams, you can open Planner in Teams and you can open OneNote in Teams. Maybe you do some of your project planning inside of OneNote instead of inside a Planner, um, and then you open them up as you need to when you're in your Teams. But I just wanted to share with you this possibility because I think it's going to really help me focus in faster, make sure I'm not missing critical deadlines, and see my most important stuff from a slightly more strategic level. I'm excited to see how productive 2025 turns into because of this. All right, so with that, let's go to the end of the video now and get a here out of Planner. So I'd like to thank you for your time on today's video. Um, once again, I'm Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. Let me make this a little bigger for all of you. And, um, if you'd like to learn more about me, go check out my website, randalldean.com. Um, you'll notice that, uh, on that site, uh, information about the different programs that I lead in both webinar and in person. And, um, if you'd like to get a series of little productivity PDF tip sheets, send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, and just put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send you some bonus materials that will allow you to pick up even more tips for better using your technology, managing your time. And with that, I'm going to say thank you. We are done. Happy New Year. Hope you like this little, little New Year's gift. Bye now.