Do more with labels in planner

Is 25 labels in Planner a lot or could they be repurposed?

Labels in Planner are visual cues, drawing attention to tasks, for reasons you define. For example, you might use labels to tag tasks with the same completion requirements, dependencies, or issues, and then filter your plan on those labels to zero-in on related tasks. In short, labels are a quick, visual way to categorize similar tasks.

Planner is purposed as a kanban tool to manage project and tasks. It is flexible such that it can be repurposed for non-kanban scenarios as well like managing a set of to-do lists for self or team, a workshopping exercise like “start, stop, continue”, or just a set of ideas that needs to be tracked.

Recently I was in a similar actvity with a group of colleagues where we listed out focus areas (as tasks) under categories (as buckets). The nature of the activity was to rate/vote on the focus areas by each member in the group so the focus areas that get the most votes gets prioritized. As there is no rating or voting options in planner, we used labels instead and repurposed them.

Since the labels are editable, we edited one label per group member and used it as a “thumbs-up” emoji to vote.

To create the thumbs up labels,

1. click open a task
2. click the label field
3. choose a label and click the pen icon
4. remove the label text
5. With mouse cursor in the edit label field, press windows key + period key on keyboard.
6. type “thumbs” and choose the thumbs up icon
7. repeat this for each of the 25 labels (one for each team member)

After this you can set the thumbs up labels on any card inside the plan in planner. If you need to use the same labels in another plan you will need to repeat this work in the other plan.

Hope you find this trick useful, feel free to share.