Microsoft Outlook Task Manager: 3 Other Task Views That I Use Frequently!

All right. Hi everybody, Randy Dean here, email sanity expert. And what I wanted to do today is to build a follow-up video for those of you that have been following me and how I utilize the Outlook task function. And to give you a little reminder, here's sort of something interesting. About 3 or 4 years ago, actually, I built a video about the Today view in the Outlook Task Tool. And this is the Today view right here. Notice that I've got it selected on today up here in Current View. And this is a super powerful tool. I'm gonna give you the link to this video in the comments below, and I might give you the info link up here in the corner of the screen. Because I checked out that video, somebody had just posted a comment on my YouTube channel. That's why I decided to build this video. Saying that even though the video was a couple, 3 years old, it's still remarkably relevant and useful. I actually then went and watched the video again to see if I needed to remake it. I realized it's really solid. It's still like 99.5% accurate. If you want to understand how to use this view, the today view, I'd recommend you watch that video because I've already done all that work. Now, the interesting thing is why do I like this view so much? Well, notice it only shows me the stuff for today except for the thing I missed yesterday. And the thing I missed yesterday is right at the top. That's good. You want to see the thing you didn't get done yesterday right at the top. The things I've gotten done today are crossed out. I can see what I've gotten done today, but then when it becomes tomorrow, those things disappear. Now they're not gone. We'll talk about that in a minute, but I can see what I'm getting done as I'm working my day. And not only that, I can actually— watch this, I'm going to turn this to low. Notice you can prioritize your tasks, and I can see my list high to mid to low for today. And if you use the categories like I mentioned in that other video, what I'm doing with my categories is I'm turning them into labels for my key projects, clients, customers, vendors, co-workers, activities, events, etc. And, you know, you just come down here to All Categories and you rename all these color codes right there, or add new when you need more to all of those things. And that means that on this page, not only can I see today's tasks high to mid to low, except for the one I missed yesterday, across my key projects, clients, customers, vendors, co-workers. And so what I've been teaching for a few years now is that this is one of the very first things you should do every day is get yourself a prioritized SMART project client activity focused task list that is not too crazy for the day you have today. Does that make sense? I think it makes some sense. And maybe consider doing that when you look at your calendar first thing in the morning and before you even look at your email. Crazy thought. Look at your calendar, figure out what's going on with your time today and maybe a few days in advance, build a SMART-focused task list for today that matches your available time for today, but also your key projects, activities, clients, and events. Sounds pretty logical, wouldn't you think? Spend your first few minutes of the day building a good SMART plan for your time and your actions for the day. Before you dive into all those squirrels in your email. So this is what I've been teaching for a few years, and it's a powerful view. Watch the other video if you really want to understand this. But here's the thing, this is not the only view that I use. There's 3 other views inside the Outlook Task Manager that I'm using quite regularly. Let's talk about those 3 views. Now notice you can go up here to Current View, or you can come up to View Change View to jump around in your views. Now I sort of prefer doing it from the box on the top, but if you don't see the box on the top, go to View, Change View. The, the other view that I really like is right here, Active. Let me show you why. I'm doing something very specific with Active. Now let me explain Active. It's everything that hasn't been marked completed. So if you make a task and you haven't marked it complete, it's an active task. Now what I'm doing that's a little bit unique here though is because I'm using my categories. Let me show you what I've done here, which is interesting. Notice that I have actually sorted my categories— I mean my tasks that are active, meaning they haven't been marked complete— by category, which means I'm sorting my tasks by project person, client, customer, activity, event, even some personal stuff. I can see the tasks related to all of those things in this view. Now wait, I want to go back for a second though. Let me show you something here. Let's go back to the Today view. Notice this, I've got a couple of these tasks on today that are in more than one category, like this one here, Complete and Submit Speaker Form. Marketing, PR, client prospects. Now, now let me share with you what that means. I've taken a single task. Let's open it all the way up, and I put it in two different categories. Now let me tell you what's cool about what I'm doing with the active view, because I'm sorting it by category. Let's do this again. Let's knock these down. That single task is now in both of those categories. Now there's one little thing that's a little goofy. If you've been opening it up and closing it a little bit, it sometimes opens up your entire thing. But, uh, I want to share this with you. That one task was in both Client Prospect and Marketing PR, and I will see that one task in both of these lists. Meaning I can make a task that goes into more than one project activity, client event, and when I go to this view, I can see the task in both lists. Meaning I won't miss it if it goes in more than one thing. And a lot of us have tasks that cross over multiple projects or activities or events or people. This way you can tag it with multiple things and see it in every single relevant list. Now, some of you are probably supervising staff. If you're supervising staff, you can make one of your categories each person on your staff, and everything that you assign to that person, you could give that category to. And then when you come in here, you can see everything that's on their plate. That's cool. Now you're probably wondering, well, how did I do this? How did I set this up like this? It's super easy. You come up here to the top and right-click. Now see, I'm over this bar that's right here at the top. It's the header bar on this task view. Now what I can do is come down here and hit View Settings. And when I go into View Settings, you want to come down here to Group By. And when you do Group By, notice I have it set up as Categories ascending, which means in alpha order from A to Z. And that's all I had to do to get it to view like this. Now what's interesting, I'm also sorting by due date and priority, which means that when I open up any one of these, I can see it by the due date and then the priority. But hold on a second. Now let's, let's look at what this means in reality. Because I'm doing something else a little bit unique here. Here's my streaming programs. Now, I've been doing a bunch of work over the recent holiday on getting my streaming programs significantly upgraded, improved, and getting new information into them. Now, the interesting thing about this is I want to share something with you. Notice this, because I'm sorting it, um, newest to farthest in the future, Look what it did here, which is really interesting. All the ones with no due date are at the very top. And then if I go down a ways, I can find all the ones that I've committed a due date to. Now you're probably wondering, what the heck are all these things in here with no due date? Ideas. That's what they are. What I've done is I have put inside of each of these— if I have an idea but it's something I'm not 100% sure I want to commit to, I can add it in here, give it no due date. Now here's what's really cool. It won't show on the Today view because it doesn't have a due date, but I don't have to lose the idea. If I have a decent idea and I'm at some point in the future where I want to be able to access more ideas to do more things on a project activity client event, boom, I've got a storage shed of a bunch of ideas for each of my different projects, activities, events. And you can see I've been just putting down a bunch of ideas of things that I can do to upgrade my programs, improve my programs. Now that doesn't mean I'm going to do all these things, but here's the interesting thing. When I get down here, these are the ones I've sort of committed to, because notice they have active due dates and some of them have active priorities. And so when I do these ones These are the ones that will show in the time-based view. So not only can I see my task list by date today, including the one I missed yesterday, I can also see it by project, person, client, customer, vendor, coworker. And in both of those places, I can see it high to mid to low. And in this view in particular I can see ideas and store ideas for later that I don't have to commit to, but I don't have to lose them. Okay, that's view number 2. Here's view number 3, and it's right next to it, Completed. And let's just talk about this. This is a genius view, and let me explain why. Wouldn't it be nice to know what you got done and when you got it done and have a record of that. That's what this view does. And so what I always tell people is, if you got something done in your task list, don't delete, mark complete. Because by marking it complete, what happens is it becomes date stamped for that date, and it will now appear as some one of the things you got done that day. I uploaded some new, um, videos on OneNote and OneDrive to a couple of the relevant programs in my e-learning academy. Boom, it's date stamped. And now if I ever have to come back, I can find the date that I actually did that task. But what's interesting is when you mark stuff completed, here's what's cool about the way the Today View works. Tomorrow, all of these things that I've already marked completed today, they disappear. But they're not gone. They just disappear from the Today View. You still have a full record of them in your Completed Items View. Now let's talk about where this might be somewhat useful in in the future. Performance reviews coming up. What the heck was I working on 4 and a half months ago? You can pop right in here and see exactly what you were working on 4 and a half months ago. Or you ever been caught into a he said, she said where somebody says, I didn't, I never got your document or your report or your delivery. And you say, I'm certain I sent it. I'm certain I confirmed it. Well, trust me on this. I've had this happen before where people said, I never received it. I pop in here and I see the date I send it. And then let's say it was something I sent by email. I can find the date that I marked it complete. I can go to my sent folder. Is it in my sent folder? Yep, there it is. And wait, I can even go one step for further. Usually when I'm sending something that I want people to confirm they got it I ask them for a confirmation of receipt. I actually say, please confirm you received this. A lot of times I can go right into the client folder or the vendor folder and I can find their reply telling me they got it. Now let me tell you this, you get into a he said, she said, he or she with best documentation wins. This is a super-powered CYA tool. And if you don't know what CYA stands for, go ask somebody, they'll tell you. Now here's the other thing. Not only does it help you with that, but there's even, uh, another way that you can use this. If you were to then take this and group— remember I showed you how to do that, you come down here and go to View Settings— and let's say I wanted to group it by, instead by category, I could then see everything I've gotten done on a specific project or activity or event. Now, here's where that might be useful. Are you ever going to do the same thing again in the future or something remarkably similar? You could then use this as a way to see everything you did last time without having to recreate the wheel. Powerful. That's, that's institutional knowledge. And then when you get done, you can just come back and change it to group by date completed and switch it back to the standard view. There's one final way that this works really well. I have some clients that do this thing called billable hours. Most of them are in law, marketing, advertising, and/or accounting. And people that work in those firms often have to do this thing called billable hour sheets where they basically track what their time and they track what they did and which client it was for, and that's how they send out their annual billing. Or their weekly billing or their monthly billing, however you do your billing. Well, here's one thing that happened when I was doing this program for one of my law firm clients. I was talking about this view and the guy, one of the lawyers in the room goes, "Oh my gosh, I think you just saved my life." And I go, "Why?" He goes, "I could use this to track every billable item I do as I'm doing it." And think about what he said. Every billable thing you do for each and every client or case or project or activity exactly when you do it. And so here's what you do if you're, if you're doing billable hours. You could, um, make a task. If it's not on your task list, just make a task. And here's what you put in the subject line: what it is, how much time you spent, which client it was for. Maybe use the categories for that part. You could categorize it by client, mark it complete. And then when you get to the end of your billing cycle, every week, every 2 weeks, every month, you could just open this up, sort it, and boom, you've got your billable— your billable hours report completed for you. You don't have to go through all that paperwork and try to figure it out in your head. I know a lot of people are doing something like this on their calendar. Oh my gosh, that would just make your calendar awful, in my opinion. You'd have so much stuff. And it would just become so unwieldy. This is clean and easy, and it would be super easy to use. Now, that's, that's a second view. So we've, we've talked about the Active View with Completed View. There's one more view that I use pretty frequently, and you probably already noticed it. Take a look at this. It's right next to Today. It's called the Next 7 Days View. But before I open this little gem up, let's go back to the Today View. Notice that I didn't make it to the pharmacy yesterday, and I still need to get to the pharmacy today. I'm actually picking up a script for my dog. No jokes. And, um, here's the thing. I didn't get it done yesterday. It's red at the top. Pharmacy. Remember that. Watch what happens when I click on next 7 days. Wait, what? Here's today. Here's tomorrow. See, this is a view that you can see not just today but maybe a few days in advance to sort of plan ahead a little bit in your task list, sort of like you would do in your calendar. Handy! And I've got it sorted the same way that I have my Today view, high to mid to low. But there's one major watch out if you want to use the Next 7 Days view. It doesn't show anything that's backdated because it's not in the next 7 days. Be very careful if you use the Next 7 Days view. Make sure that anything that you have in the, in the Today view is forward dated to at least today. Now watch this, I'll switch this to today. And click off of it. That changed. Whoops, let me do that one more time. It didn't, didn't take for some reason. Let's go to— all right, I'll just do it this way. Due date today, save and close. And now it's dated for today, hopefully. And let's go to next 7 days. And that's really weird, I got a funky thing going on here. Let's try it one more time. Today. And there it goes. Now watch, next 7 days. And pharmacy, there it is. Okay, I don't know why I was doing that. Double-check yourself when you're using this so that you don't have things like that happen to you. You got to see real-time usage of somebody using their Outlook tools. But I hope that this helps you understand the scope of what's possible here, because this combination of all of these views can really help you leverage this in a way that will allow you to better manage your day, better manage your projects, clients, activities, events, maybe better manage your people, and plan ahead a little bit better while also tracking everything you got done and being able to access that information as needed. Oh, by the way, I don't use this one too much because of the nature of my firm, but there is one more view in here you might want to take a look at called Assigned. If you've assigned any of your tasks across your team members, here's where you could find those too. So a few views to take a look at. Let's finish this thing up. As you know, I'm Randy Dean. I have added a new Patreon page, but I also mentioned that I've done some research recent significant updates to my online streaming programs. I'll give you a link to my streaming program channel so you can go see that. I've got some special deals going on right now because of both coronavirus and, you know, when I made this video, Cyber Monday is coming up. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about me and my programs, you know, definitely go check out my website randaldean.com and you can actually click on the e-learning tab from there if you'd like to learn more. If you like my videos, please like the— hit the like button, hit subscribe. And if you'd like to get a whole series of bonus PDF articles on time management, email management, Outlook usage, if some of you use Google also, Google usage, smartphone and tablets, etc., I've got a whole slew of little productivity PDFs, including a cheat sheet to this YouTube channel. If you'd like to get any of those, just send me an email, randy@randaldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line and I'll send you the stuff and you can dive in and do some serious self-study to improve your personal productivity and activities. So with that, I'd like to say thank you. We are done.