Tips & Tricks Tuesday: A work list that works hard for you

We love excellent uses of Smart Lists to show a specific set of tasks and to hide the rest. This week’s tip, shared by ashley.banks, shows a useful collection of immediate and upcoming tasks, includes those without due dates, and hides some repeating tasks you may not need to see yet.

I recently started using RTM for work, and part of my struggle was capturing items that didn’t have strict deadlines. Postponing things constantly was a waste of time. Also, I wanted to see things with upcoming deadlines so that I wasn’t caught by surprise.

After a lot of tweaking, I settled on the following Smart List, which I call “Work To Do” (creative, yeah?). Searched for:

(status:incomplete) AND (due:never OR due:today OR dueBefore:now OR (dueWithin:"1 week" AND NOT tag:recur)) AND (location:work)

This captures only work items, showing me items that are currently or overdue, deadlines coming up (within a week), and those items that don’t have actual deadlines.

The “NOT tag:recur” command keeps my list free of clutter, as I have daily tasks that I want to make sure end up on my list each morning, but I don’t want lingering once I’ve done them for the day.

You could use “AND isRepeating:false” instead to achieve the same goal, but I have some non-daily recurring tasks that I do want to be included in my “upcoming week warning”, so I find tagging my daily recurrences to be more useful for me.

Thanks for sharing this tip, ashley.banks! 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.