I share my impressions of the new service Microsoft for managing and organizing personal affairs.
Microsoft Introduced the To-Do app on April 19. The announcement went quietly: some media wrote notes about the application, and the next day everything was forgotten.
Another bike
This situation is easy to explain. In June 2015 Microsoft bought the Wunderlist service together with the development team. This team worked on the new To-Do application. But the most interesting thing is that in the future Microsoft it will drop support for Wunderlist and replace it with To-Do. This will happen when 'Transferring the Best of Wunderlist to To-Do'. There is no specific date, it will happen in a month, a year, five years – no one knows. Therefore, while the To-Do application has been launched as a 'trial version' (as they say on the official website), and gradually the service will acquire new functions.
This is a serious step from the outside Microsoft. Not every company can close a service with an audience of more than 13 million users (data for June 2015). Therefore, they are preparing users for this gradually: they quietly launched To-Do, hung a banner on the Wundelist website with a proposal to familiarize themselves with the new service and quietly announced that, sometime in the future, they would stop supporting Wunderlist. Therefore, I consider it important to familiarize yourself with the To-Do service and tell others about it, because most of the Wunderlist audience will be forced to switch to it.
Is it a complete replacement?
So far, To-Do is only suitable for personal affairs, household or work. Writing a plan for a week for work is no problem, making a list of groceries for going to the store is easy, keeping a record of movies to watch is easy. But you can't share the list of products yet, you can't attach a document to a work assignment, just like add a subtask. It is in the Wunderlist and will appear later in the To-Do, but when it will happen – no one knows. If these functions are important, then you have to wait.
Left – To-Do, right – Wunderlist
But I, for example, do not use anything of this and do business only for myself. Therefore, the transition from Wunderlist to To-Do was painless. The service is perfect for organizing your work and reminding you of household or daily activities.
To-Do is available for Android, iPhone, Windows and for work in the browser. In the future, they will add support for iPad and 'smart' watches Apple Watch and Android Wear. You can transfer your data from Wunderlist and Todoist; lists from other services will have to be added manually.
Lists
Upon launching the application, the user is greeted with the 'My Day' section. This is a list of things to do for today. Everyone can work on it in different ways: compose it on the same day or plan ahead using the reminder function.
The tab on the left contains custom lists. I have, for example: work, study, personal, shopping, films for viewing, books. You can compose your catalog.
New case
A task is added by clicking the blue circle in the lower right corner – enter the name of the note and it appears in the list open in the application. Further, the task can be supplemented: select a due date, create a reminder, add a comment, or add it to the 'My day' section.
Working with lists
So, we filled in the lists. It remains to make a plan for today. It's easier to go through the tabs and, swiping the task card from left to right, add it to the 'My day' section. If some task is not needed, delete by swiping from right to left.
You are now ready to go. We completed a task – noted it in the application, new cases appeared – added to the list. It's easier for me to do this at the end of the day.
Optional: completed tasks can be hidden or remain on the list, but will be crossed out.
Unfulfilled cases do not disappear, the application will advise you to postpone them to the next day. A simple built-in assistant is responsible for this, which was placed in the 'Offers' tab (light bulb icon).
It displays the totals of previous days, overdue tasks and tasks without a due date, which the application recommends to do today, adding to the 'My day' section.
I liked the recommendation feature. It often helps not to forget about things that had to be postponed.
Conclusion
To-Do is definitely worth paying attention to. Especially for Wunderlist users, as they will have to look for a replacement in the future. I'm sure Microsoft will make it easier for users to switch to To-Do. The company is already setting the stage for this.
Although I would suggest just trying To-Do, even if you don't use Wunderlist. It's a simple, easy to use and free personal business app.
I will follow the project further, see what comes of it.