Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Auto-generating your grocery list with repeating tasks

It’s easy to make your grocery list, but what if you forget something? This week, xtoq shares a tip to use repeating tasks to keep staples on your grocery list using repeats so you’ll always remember when to buy those items.

I’ve been using RTM for a long time now, and I wanted to share my grocery shopping list strategy. I’m not sure exactly how much I came up with on my own and how much came from users in this forum and others, but hopefully other easily distracted and forgetful grocery shoppers out there can benefit.

I found it was easy to keep a list, but not so easy to remember what I needed every week, if this was the week I needed trash bags or if that was next week, etc. I didn’t like some of the suggestions of looking at completed tasks and “uncompleting” them, or keeping an email with my basics on it. Then I discovered the “repeat after” feature, and now I hardly ever forget stuff at the store.

First, you need to make a list, either normal or Smart, to hold your groceries. I made a Smart List named “shopping list” with the criteria “tag:shopping” and I include everything from groceries to gifts. Either way, you add tasks through this list so they are in the right place.

Next, start adding tasks/items; I started with all our basics. I don’t sort by aisle or anything like that, but nearly all of the grocery shopping sorting tips in this forum will work with my system. The key here is the “repeat after” function, so for each item you put in the list, decide how often you need it while you’re adding it. For example, we need eggs every week, and diapers every 2 weeks:

Eggs #shopping #grocery #@errand ^monday *after 1 week
Diapers #shopping #grocery #@errand ^monday *after 2 weeks

What this means is that when I check it off my list, eggs will appear back on my list with a due date of one week after I checked it off! There have been countless times I’ve opened my shopping list for the weekly printout and discovered it was time to buy something that I surely would have forgotten otherwise. This works especially well for things like trash bags and toilet paper that you buy in bulk, and therefore only buy once every month or two. If you find that the “repeat after” time you’ve set is too often or too seldom, you can easily adjust it in the tag information. You don’t have to add a due date at the time you put the task in either, just check it off when you purchase it and RTM will create a new task for you, complete with new due date.

I also use this for household tasks, yard work, or anything that might repeat that I might not remember to do/buy until it’s too late.

Thanks for sharing this tip, xtoq! 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.