About tasks and task assignments

A task is a personal or work-related errand you want to track through completion. A task can occur once or repeatedly (a recurring task). A recurring task can repeat at regular intervals or repeat based on the date you mark the task complete. For example, you might want to send a status report to your manager on the last Friday of every month, and get a haircut when one month has passed since your last haircut.

Task assignments

In addition to creating your own tasks, you can create tasks that you assign to others. You do this by sending a task request to someone. The person who receives the task request becomes the temporary owner of the task. They can decline the task, accept the task, or assign the task to someone else. If they decline the task, it's returned to you. (You still have to reclaim ownership by returning the task to your task list.) If they accept the task, they become the permanent owner. If they assign the task to someone else, the new assignee becomes the owner.

The owner is the only one who can make changes to the task. When an owner updates a task, Microsoft Outlook updates all copies of that task ù the copy for the person who originally sent the task request and copies for any prior owners of that task. When the owner completes the task, Outlook automatically sends a status report to the person who originally assigned the task, any other prior owners, and anyone else who requested a report.

If you assign a task to more than one person at a time, you cannot keep an updated copy of the task in your task list. To assign the same project to more than one person and have Outlook keep you up to date on work progress, divide the work into separate tasks, and then assign each one individually. For example, to assign a report to three writers, create three tasks named Write Report: Writer 1, Write Report: Writer 2, and Write Report: Writer 3.