Tips & Tricks Tuesday: A fresh perspective on organizing your tasks

Thinking of things in a different way is always a good idea.

Here, with andreyas’s tip, you can indulge in a few fresh ideas for organizing your tasks in a straightforward way: adding tasks quickly, easy dating, and easy prioritization from day to day.

I like to use RTM like a digital notepad, where I can write something fast, and edit all of this after (very fast and comfortable, especially with mass editing), and decide what to do in real time, using a couple of Smart Lists. I found that the most free approach is the best for me, so I can focus on doing, rather than over-planning and provoking excessive thoroughness and perfectionism.

1. Inbox and Work_Inbox

(From GTD, but without any obligations to sort it every week.) Most of the ideas that come to my mind go there. I have a repeated task to sort it, but, honestly I do it only with urgent items, that I mark as due tomorrow when creating, and “Work_Inbox” items. I hope someday I’ll get to the other items, but probably it’s a pipe dream, because I don’t have a solution at the moment, how to sort all of thousands old items, so they just keep accumulating like a journal of my old ideas, and only RTM has no problem with that :) (There are limits or big lags in other apps.)

2. Lists

I have a lot of lists for every project, groups of some theme-related tasks and so on. It’s one of the problems with RTM, that we have no nested lists, or just one level of folders and I see too many lists. My partial solution is to divide it in groups by some empty lists named as something like “——————” and “Work_Theme1”, “Work_Theme2” and so on.

3. Due dates

I put “today” as the due date for every task that I want or need to do in the nearest days/weeks, so I don’t use the Today list as a list of tasks that I must do today, but as a list of tasks, that I may do today.

It is usual for me to have 100-150 or more tasks there. It can look like too much, but for me it’s way more comfortable, than to force myself to give up tasks, that can’t “fit” in my day and to suffer that I need to postpone it every day.

I prefer to have a little hope, that I can do some of them today if I have time, and start to do the most important tasks faster and not so thoroughly, where it’s acceptable. At the end of the day, I just postpone everything to tomorrow. It is so easy in RTM.

4. Priorities

1. I use p1 for tasks that I really need to do today (and morning tasks to see them at the top), or feel I don’t want to postpone it for even one more day, and it could be about 10-20 tasks, but I can do only 3, 5 or 10. I just try to start from most important and urgent of it and that’s okay if I don’t do all of them.
2. p2 is for more or less urgent tasks, that I want to do in in the coming days or to switch to a different type of tasks spontaneously today.
3. p3 all other tasks.
4. p4 for routines with time, like reminders to take a pill.

5. Tags

I use tags for contexts to filter tasks in Smart Lists:

1. City (tasks in the city)
2. Phone (what can I do with my phone or that I want to see when I’m with my phone)
3. Home (to filter out tasks, that I can’t do with my phone outside)
4. Three tags Read, Video, Audio for saved content
5. Cal (to see fixed time events in future)

6. Smart Lists

1. WorkToday (all of the tasks from my lists, which name contains “Work” and due date is before tomorrow)
2. Top (p1 and due date is before tomorrow, if I want to focus on tasks and to reorder them manually)
3. City (tag City and due date is before tomorrow)
4. Walk (tag Video or Audio and due date is before tomorrow)
5. Phone (tag Phone or Read or Video or Audio and due date is before tomorrow)
6. Phone-City (the same, minus Home tasks)

7. Sorting & Grouping

Today and other filters: I like to group tasks by priority (so p1 is in focus, and I can switch to the bottom with routines easily). And one of the best features in RTM is that I can sort tasks by the number of times I postponed them, so when I have a lot of recurring tasks, I can easily rotate them. This is a lifeline for those who can’t do the same thing every day. If I complete recurring tasks, the postpone counter resets to zero and that task goes to the bottom of priority group for the next day (so I use due-postponed-created order for sorting and priorities for grouping).

Inbox: Last edited go to the top, so I can find last created and edited items very easily.

Thanks for sharing your tips, andreyas! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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