Microsoft To Do vs Pokobot
A work tool holding your personal life.
Microsoft To Do is better than its reputation, largely because people remember it as the thing that replaced Wunderlist and hold a grudge. It is free with no paid tier at all, it turns a flagged Outlook email into a task, and My Day is one of the better ideas in this whole category: a list that empties every morning and makes you choose again.
The awkwardness is not in the software. It is that for most people this app arrived through work, lives in a work account, and is administered by an employer, and yet it is where they keep the reminder about the dentist.
The short answer
Microsoft To Do and Pokobot both send reminders at a set time, and the difference is whose account they live in. To Do is free, genuinely capable, and for most people it comes bundled with the Microsoft 365 their employer pays for. Its reminders take a real time, repeat properly, and arrive as notifications on whatever device you are signed in on. The catch is one of ownership rather than features. Personal and work accounts do not merge, so most people end up with two separate To Do worlds and switch between them. The work one belongs to the employer, and it goes when the job does, taking the tasks with it. Pokobot lives on your phone number in WhatsApp, which nobody provisions and nobody can revoke.
Head to head
| Microsoft To Do | Pokobot | |
|---|---|---|
| Turning a flagged email into a taskMicrosoft To Do | Flag it in Outlook and it appears in To Do, with the mail attached | Nothing. It has never seen your inbox and cannot |
| Steps, notes and attachmentsMicrosoft To Do | Break a task into steps, add notes, attach a file | A line of text, and nowhere to attach anything |
| Shared listsMicrosoft To Do | Share a list, assign items, work the same list as a team | No shared list of any kind. It messages one person |
| Free foreverMicrosoft To Do | Yes, completely. There is no paid tier to be upsold to | No. 7 days free, then a small subscription (from ₹59/month in India) |
| Personal and work in one placePokobot | No. The two accounts stay separate and you switch between them | One thread. It has no concept of a work you and a home you |
| Surviving a change of jobPokobot | A work account goes when the job does, and the tasks in it go too | Tied to your phone number, which no employer issued |
| Where the reminder landsPokobot | A notification, on a device you are signed in on | A WhatsApp message, in the thread you read without deciding to |
| Repeating faster than dailyPokobot | Daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly, yearly, custom. Nothing shorter | Every thirty minutes if you want, with a window so it sleeps |
| Nudging someone outside MicrosoftPokobot | Sharing a list needs them to have a Microsoft account | Poko messages their WhatsApp, whatever they use, once they agree |
It is free and it is good, which is a hard combination to beat
There is no version of this page that argues Microsoft To Do is bad software. It is free with no paid tier anywhere in it, which almost nothing else in this comparison can say, and several of the things it does have no answer here.
If your day looks like this, keep it and stop reading.
- Living in Outlook. Flagging an email and having it become a task, with the thread still attached, is worth more than anything on this page.
- My Day, which is genuinely one of the better ideas in this category: a clean list every morning, with suggestions pulled from everything you have.
- Steps, notes and attachments, for tasks that need more than one line.
- Shared lists with your team or your household, assigned and ticked off together.
- Costing nothing, ever, on every platform including Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.
Your evening is not on your work account
Here is the shape of the problem, and it is not really a software problem. The reminders people actually miss are personal: the medication, the renewal, the call to the clinic, the thing you promised your mother. For a large number of people, the To Do app they have open is the work one, because that is the account their employer set up.
So personal obligations end up filed in a tool that belongs to an organisation, alongside the project tasks, on a tenant with an administrator and a retention policy. Nothing sinister happens. It is just an odd place to keep the fact that your prescription runs out on Thursday, and it is only open during the hours when none of those things are due.
A WhatsApp thread has no such boundary. It is on your number, which you had before this job and will have after it, and it is the same thread whether it is Tuesday at eleven or Sunday at nine. It also nudges at a rhythm To Do has no setting for. More than once a day describes 35.8% of the reminders created here, and every one of those takes a start and an end hour, so it is not still going at three in the morning.
collect the prescription on Thursday at 5pmcall mum every Sunday at 7pmchase the landlord every 3 hours between 10am and 6pmMost people end up with two To Do accounts
This is the practical version of the problem and it catches nearly everyone. A personal Microsoft account and a work or school account are separate worlds in To Do. Separate lists, separate My Day, separate everything, and they do not merge.
So you either keep two and switch between them, which means half your obligations are invisible at any given moment, or you give up and put everything in whichever one is open, which is almost always the work one. Neither is a good outcome, and the second is how personal life ends up on a corporate tenant.
It is worth being fair about why: the separation is deliberate and correct. An employer cannot have personal data mixed into a managed tenant, and you would not want your dentist appointment discoverable in a legal hold. The design is right. It just leaves the person in the middle running two lists.
My Day is a good idea that closes with the app
My Day deserves proper credit. It resets every morning, so yesterday's guilt does not carry over, and Suggestions offers up what is overdue or due soon so you are choosing rather than staring at an empty list. As a daily ritual it is better designed than most paid apps manage.
It is also a ritual, which means it works on the days you perform it. Open the app, pick your handful, close the app, and from that point the list is a thing you decided rather than a thing that acts. To Do will notify you about the items that carry a time, and those notifications land in the tray with everything else.
This is not an argument against My Day. It is an argument for doing both: choose the day in a tool built for choosing, and let the four things that would genuinely hurt to miss arrive somewhere you cannot skim past.
When the job ends, so does the list
Work accounts get deprovisioned. It is not a possibility, it is the standard process, and it usually happens on your last day with no warning window worth the name.
Everything in that account goes with it, including any personal reminders you had quietly filed there. People do export their mail before leaving a job. Almost nobody thinks to export their task list, and the recurring ones, the renewals and the annual reminders, are exactly the ones you would only discover missing a year later when the thing lapsed.
That is a specific and avoidable failure. Anything personal wants to live somewhere your employer did not issue and cannot switch off, and a phone number is about as durable as that gets.
Where each one belongs
Work in To Do, life in a thread. The line is unusually easy to draw here because it is the same line your IT department already drew.
Anything that arrived by email, anything with a colleague attached, anything you would discuss in a standup: To Do, where the flagged mail and the shared list and My Day all earn their keep, at no cost. Anything that is yours, particularly anything recurring or long-dated: somewhere that is also yours.
There is nothing to migrate. Most people find the personal list is five or six items long, which is about the right size for a chat thread and too small to have justified a second app.
Questions, answered
- Is Microsoft To Do free?
- Yes, entirely. There is no paid tier and no feature held back behind one, which is rare in this category and a genuine point in its favour. You need a Microsoft account, and for most people at work that account is provided and administered by their employer.
- Can Microsoft To Do send reminders to WhatsApp?
- No. Reminders go out as notifications through the To Do apps, or by email in Outlook. Getting one to WhatsApp would mean Power Automate or a similar service in the middle, plus a WhatsApp sending account with approved templates, which is a fair amount of machinery for a nudge.
- Why do my personal and work To Do lists not show together?
- Because personal and work or school Microsoft accounts are separate and do not merge in To Do. You switch between them. That separation is deliberate and correct, since an employer's tenant should not hold your personal data, but the practical effect is two lists and only one of them visible at a time.
- What happens to my tasks if I leave my job?
- The work account gets deprovisioned and everything in it goes, tasks included. People remember to export their mail and almost never think about the task list. Recurring and long-dated personal reminders are the ones that hurt, because you find out they are gone a year later when something lapsed.
- Can Microsoft To Do remind me every two hours?
- No. Its repeat options run daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly, yearly and custom, and none of that goes below a day. Pokobot reads “every 2 hours between 9am and 7pm” as a single instruction, including the part about when to leave you alone.
- Should I stop using Microsoft To Do?
- No, especially if you live in Outlook, where flagging an email into a task is something nothing here can match. The narrow suggestion is to stop keeping personal reminders in an account somebody else administers, and to move that handful somewhere tied to your own phone number instead.