What Is a Task?

You might be skeptical of time management and personal organizers. However, the Tasks feature can make a believer of you by doing the following:

• Allowing you to create and maintain lists of things to do, as well as track tasks by project, by the people involved, and by priority.

• Letting you maintain lists of recurring tasks that either occur on specified dates or occur a certain time after the preceding occurrence of the task is completed.

• Allowing delegation of tasks and task management to other people, for those times when you're too busy to do it yourself.

• Accepting task assignments from others. This is certainly not fun, but at least Tasks makes it easy by enabling you to integrate a new incoming task into your list of things to do.

All of this, naturally, begs the question: What is a task ? Basically, a task is anything that requires somebody's action. Are appointments tasks? Semantically, most certainly. In Outlook, they're different things, but there's no reason appointments can't become tasks, and vice versa. Even Journal entries correspond to work you've done. If you need to track work you do for clients , perhaps Journal entries should become tasks, too.