Does anyone actually use Planner / tasks.office.com?

[symm_adrian]

I thought this would be a useful tool for tracking my projects/to-dos with my manager but it has been an unbelievably complicated ordeal to get it set up in a way that's not alerting our entire IT team.

1. Creating a new Plan allows visibility to all users who already have access to the SharePoint site that the plan gets created under. Why? Why is this an automatic thing? Its my planner, not the team's planner, not a shared planner. Why put the options in there to isolate it if by default, you're going to make it visible to everyone?

2. Alerting/notifications. This "app" feels incredibly half baked. I don't want to notify everyone every time I make a comment on something. 

3. Attached files - it seems the planner just takes the attachments and dumps them into the root Documents folder in the associated SharePoint site. Why?

One of my initial problems with tasks/planner is that when I initially spun up my own plan, I thought it was only going to have a small footprint. Instead, it seemingly created an entire SharePoint site, an O365 group, and some other things I was totally not expecting.

Maybe I'm just using the planner wrong? I envisioned creating a plan for myself and attaching my manager to it so he could review my weekly tasks. When I created the plan, the entire IT team had visibility and began receiving notifications in the group anytime I made an update. I get the collaboration thing but those should be options to set and ENABLE. Not be enabled by default. This app needs some serious overhauling and while I'm sure someone is going to suggest I put all of this into the UserVoice community and have them vote on it, the reality is there are bugs or requests about notifications that have been around for nearly 2 years in that UV that have yet to be addressed.

How should I be starting a task/planner solely for review between myself and my boss that doesn't create this giant O365 footprint?

[#2]

Planner is a service meant to be used by many ( a group of people ) hence that creating a planner plan creates a office 365 group and surrounding workloads! And of course the integration with teams! Soon now also with planner notifications in Teams!
Also, many features of Planner needs improvement as well!
I’d suggest you use Microsoft ToDo instead which is a service meant for individual use, even if you can share your lists!
Also recently you may now also have your assigned planner tasks in ToDo, to be able to work from one place!

[#3]

@adam deltinger: I should have clarified. I would like to use it with only CERTAIN members of my team. Initially, I only wanted to share this with my direct manager. In time, I would have liked to have added my other team-members so they have visibility into my workload as well. 

It still doesn't address all of the other issues regarding notifications, storage of attachments, etc. 

The way it came about was an existing SharePoint site for our entire IT team. I simply wanted to turn on the planner so I could plan out my tasks and provide visibility for our Infrastructure team.

The to-do app, while nice, doesn't provide great visibility or even reporting on task progress, hence my excitement about using planner. So, unfortunately, it's just not a viable solution.