Tips & Tricks Tuesday: A Smart List to find next actions
It’s possible to use Smart Lists to be very organized and to help prioritize your tasks and your time. This week’s tip, shared by megan.strickland, takes it one step further: a Smart List that helps you sift through what you can work on next… with less effort.
Many people identify “next actions” with a tag, but I prefer for tasks to be next actions by default. (Otherwise, I worry that something will “fall through the cracks” in between my weekly reviews if I forget to tag it.) Doing it this way gives me peace of mind, so I’m not taking up brain space with worrying about it.
To accomplish this, I set up a Smart List that identifies everything that is NOT a next action, and then exclude that list from my @context lists.
This is basically a combination of rajjan’s famous sleeper tag method and chad.davis’s briliant start date tag idea.
Here are my exclusion Smart List criteria:
• (tag:zzz AND dueAfter:now) OR
(tag:z1d AND dueAfter:“1 day of now”) OR
(tag:z2d AND dueAfter:“2 days of now”) OR
(tag:z1w AND dueAfter:“1 week of now”) OR
(tag:z1m AND dueAfter:“1 month of now”) OR
(tag:startdate AND dueAfter:today) OR
(tag:tickleme AND dueAfter:today)
• If you use a “waiting” tag, add OR (tag:waiting)
• If you use a “project” tag, add OR (tag:project)
• etc.…
Call the Smart List whatever you want. I left mine named “zzz” so it shows up last in my lists.
Now, to see ALL of your next actions, just search for NOT list:zzz. This is a good test to see if it’s working – if anything shows up that shouldn’t, adjust your zzz list criteria accordingly.
Then add NOT list:zzz to the end of any Smart List you use to show next actions. For example:
Smart List name: @home
Criteria: tag:@home NOT list:zzz
And one that is a little more complicated:
Smart List name: Top
Criteria: (dueBefore:“2 days from today” OR NOT priority:none) NOT list:zzz
This shows everything that is overdue, due within the next 2 days, or has a priority of 1, 2, or 3, but is not on the zzz list.
To take this one step further, I have actions default to my @computer context as well. To do that, I simply define it like this:
Smart List name: @computer
Criteria: NOT (list:zzz OR tag:@home OR tag:@out)
This way, every task ends up on my @computer list if I don’t tag it. This works for me, because if I have forgotten to tag it then the REAL next action is to tag it… which is an @computer task. And I can focus on my @context lists during the week and not worry that I’m missing something.
Thanks for sharing this tip, megan.strickland! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
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