CLOSED: [2022-05-18 Wed 19:12]
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:CREATED: [2022-05-18 Wed 17:41]
:ID: 2022-05-18-outlook-tasks
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:LOGBOOK:
- State "DONE"       from "NEXT"       [2022-05-18 Wed 19:12]
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[[https://insider.office.com/en-us/blog/the-new-outlook-for-windows-helps-you-be-more-productive-and-in-control-of-your-inbox][Microsoft has announced their latest changes to Outlook]]. I was
particular interested when reading the heading "Use your inbox as your
To Do list" as [[id:2021-07-04-email-as-todomgt][I've written about that before]].

I'm afraid that Microsoft (again) offers a lightweight solution to a
heavy problem.

Yes, there are many connections between emails and tasks. The Outlook
functionality in that direction are rather cheap, when we do consider
the professional environments where Outlook users are working in.

If you really want to tackle the situation, you would have to provide
different features on a different level.

First of all, I'm in favor of [[id:2021-01-18-feature-vs-method][starting for looking for a method before
you start using a tool]]. My [[id:2021-01-18-tool-choices][process on how to decide for a tool]]
reflects this notion. If you then settle for any non-trivial todo
management, Outlook fails to support its users in my opinion. One of
the things Microsoft does not seem to understand is that the
relationship between email and tasks is not 1:1 but rather n:m. This
means that one email is potentially related to a set of todos. On the
other side, one todo is potentially related to multiple emails. This
alone means that an integrated solution would require much more
complicated features than Outlook provides. Most probably, this would
impose strong limitations on the workflow the user is able to use.
Furthermore, this would require some learning effort in order to be
able to use this Microsoft-imposed process.

By the way, this is also the reason why [[id:2021-07-04-email-as-todomgt][using emails instead of tasks
is a bad idea]].

I would not recommend that at all in order to stay flexible with your
set of workflows, avoiding a lock-in situation process- and tool-wise.

My personal recommendation is to have a separate email setup and todo
management. All you need is a todo management system which is able to
link to emails and retrieve linked emails. This is [[id:2021-06-01-Thunderbird-to-Evolution][usually solved by
using the =Message-ID= header of each email]], if provided. Be careful
of [[id:2018-01-24-broken-outlook-links][the Microsoft pitfalls here]]. With this link method in-place, you
can maintain a rather simple workflow to integrate emails with todos
and still be able to scale up if your workflow requirements do change.

In [[id:2018-01-26-orgmode][my personal setup]], I currently manage 13,520 tasks: 1,718
non-started tasks, 414 started, 140 waiting with 11,248 closed tasks.
In my business context alone, I do have 2,076 links to emails. Of
course, most people do not have that number of tasks in their system.
But any Microsoft-solution would not provide me the possibility to
manage this amount of tasks and projects. From one of the largest
companies who provides the most widely spread groupware client, I
would have expected something that targets the professional market
much more.

If you're in the lucky position to be able to organize yourself and
your projects with no more than a set of sticky notes filled with
tasks, you most likely be able to think of adapting Outlook for your
system. For anything substantially more complicated than that, you
need to look for a more capable solution.