Tips & Tricks Tuesday: A comfortable set of lists and Smart Lists

The “complete” methods we share for how fellow users organize their tasks and lists tend to be quite thorough. This week’s tip, shared by dbblues, is comparatively simple: he aimed for a simpler set of lists, Smart Lists, and tags to keep everything organized across his apps.

Thought I’d share how my RTM is organized after a good few years of playing with different approaches, many stolen from this forum. The most effective and easiest to use format for me has emerged (thus far) as follows.

1. Four Smart Lists, each linked to an RTM priority level. These I label as Must, Should, Could and Wait. They correspond to priority levels 1, 2, 3 and none. Aside from the Inbox, these are the only lists I show in tabs.
2. A regular list for each project. These I prefix with a ’+’ so they show up first in my Task Cloud.
3. A set of five tags relating to the kind of action each task calls for: ‘arrange’, 'explore’, 'prepare’, 'review’, and 'sendout’. These seem to capture most of my project activities. I used to use 'delegate’ sometimes, but that just seemed to one form or aspect of 'arrange’.

The combination of these Smart Lists, regular lists and tags work well for me on my PC, Nexus phone, and Nexus tablet. Earlier versions were much more complex, but not more useful or comfortable.

Thanks for sharing this tip, dbblues! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.