Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 12. Using Tasks to Successfully Stay on Top of Your Obligations

Many experts in the field consider effective task management second only to organization in determining your success in achieving peak personal productivity. And while I don't have an opinion about whether task management is first or second in terms of importance, I'm clear that without effective task management, you have little hope of achieving the peak personal productivity and work/life balance you seek.

Therefore, this chapter covers best productivity strategies and practices for doing task management in Outlook. You manage your workload and personal responsibilities in Outlook through a judicious use of the Tasks module and the TaskPad in Outlook 2003 and To-Do Bar in Outlook 2007.

The Tasks module is the place where you keep and manage your complete to-do list. The task list that appears in the TaskPad in the Outlook 2003 Calendar module and the To-Do Bar in every Outlook 2007 module is designed to give you a quick look at pending tasks with upcoming due dates. Both the TaskPad and To-Do Bar show all overdue tasks in red and tasks with forthcoming due dates in black. The Outlook 2007 To-Do Bar even goes so far as to automatically group the tasks by due day into Today, This Week, Next Week, and Next Month groups.

To introduce you to this very important topic, I've broken the subject of task management with Outlook down into three simple components: the definition of a task, task management via the TaskPad ...