Tips & Tricks Tuesday: A simple meal diary with repeating tasks

Eating well is very good for you, but takes a bit of work. In this week’s tip, olliebaum started by setting up a task to plan lunch, and ends up with a nice meal diary – useful for making a habit of eating lunch daily, planning a good time for it, and saving money in the process!

I like to be able to visualise my schedule for the day ahead using RTM. An important part of this is seeing how much I will accomplish before and after lunch and also when the most appropriate time to take my lunch break will be.

Initially, I created a task called ‘Lunch’ that I would alter the due date on as necessary for that day’s schedule and then at the end of the day I would postpone it til the next day. (It seemed unnecessary to acknowledge that I had completed my lunch every day!) It allowed me to see in full the pattern of my day from beginning to end. And encouraged me into the healthy habit of planning a lunch break into my busy schedule so I didn’t go hungry when I felt there was too much to do.

This suited me fine until – on one of my more creative days – I made a lovely lunch and decided that I wanted to start taking note of what I ate every day so I could have a more varied diet and make a record of any lunches that I might want to try again.

So I created a task called 'Lunch:’ that repeats after 1 day and after eating I edit the task name to record the meal I just ate. e.g. Today I had a Bagel with cream cheese, so that becomes “Lunch: Bagel w/ cream cheese”. Once I’ve edited the task name, I can complete it and another task will be set for the next day. Then when I come to plan tomorrow’s schedule I can adjust the time as necessary for that day and so on.

It’s a nifty way to keep a track of your eating habits. At the start of the day I can type 'lunch’ into the search bar and view completed tasks and then based on my recent lunches I can see what meals I haven’t had for a while and make a packed lunch accordingly. It not only helps to keep your diet varied and interesting – avoiding the potential monotony of daily eating – but can act as a source of inspiration when stuck for ideas. You might see a good lunch that you made a couple of months ago that went down well and decide to make it again rather than simply have the same as yesterday. I also save money because it stops me falling into the lazy habit of not preparing my lunch at home and buying something from Starbucks instead.

I now use the same method to keep track of all my meals so have repeating tasks named ‘Breakfast’ and ‘Dinner’, and while these are not so important from a scheduling perspective, if you are on a diet and keeping a food diary it is useful to be prompted to make a note of what you’ve eaten, since it is all too easy to forget. And – as above – it’s good to make sure you’re not skipping meals. It also means I have a quick method to hand for planning the next day’s meals.

Thanks for sharing this tip, olliebaum! 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.