Michael Linenberger's Blog

Over the twelve years that I’ve been creating productivity systems, I’ve released and expanded three main systems, in this order:

• MYN (Master Your Now)— an advanced task or to-do list management system.
• 1MTD (The One Minute To-Do List) —a starter task or to-do list management system that works with MYN.
• Outlook Inbox Ninja—an Outlook email Inbox management system that can be combined with the two above.

Are Any of these Systems for You?

If you are new to my newsletters, you may not fully understand what these are and how they are different. You may wonder which, if any of them, you should use. I’d like to answer that here.

First of all, my target audience for all three systems is this: the overworked, overwhelmed, or over-extended office worker or manager. If that sounds like you, then one of these will work for you. In these systems, I am helping people who have too many tasks and/or too many communications, including an overloaded email Inbox.

But Which of the Three Should You Use?

If you are in the Office Insiders group (and so getting early peaks at new Outlook features), you may have noticed that in a recent Outlook update the Search bar has been moved to the top of the Windows Desktop Outlook window.

It’s not simply its position that has changed, though, it’s supposed to do faster searches and it does seem to do that. I know Microsoft has been working hard to overhaul the search engine used throughout Office and Windows, and this apparently is a next step.

Update: I’ve just created a free video about this new search box, see this post for more info.

Michael

In an Office 365 update I recently got, Microsoft has added in the Outlook Options, Mail tab, a way to turn off the Flagged Mail Highlighting feature that they added to Windows Outlook about 6 months ago. Just scroll to the very bottom of that tab.

When I originally announced that Flagged Mail Highlighting feature in my blog back then, I got more replies to that blog than almost any other I’ve ever written—all of them negative and wanting to know how to turn it off.

At that time there was no way to turn it off, but now there is.

Microsoft has just released new versions of many of its To-Do apps that have a very distinctive new look.

They have put a dark background around the entire list now (instead of just at the top). The task body remains white but now have rounded corners. Most notable is that the dark background shows between the tasks, making each task stand out a bit.

As far as I can tell, there is no functional difference. Though a few more controls are added at the right end of the new task line, as an alert reader pointed out in comments below.

I’ve seen this change appear in the Windows 10, iOS, and Android apps, but not in the web version yet.

Don’t forget I’ve got an 18-video course on how to use Microsoft To-Do with my simple 1MTD tasks system.