Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Automatic priorities with advanced sorting

Prioritizing your tasks can be an important step in feeling organized, but it can feel like it takes too much extra time. This week’s tip, shared by hiteshnh, suggests using the advanced sorting to prioritize your tasks automatically.

Why settle for just priorities when you can do much more with RTM’s advanced sort?

Inspired by Stephen R. Covey’s time management tips, I interpret the priority system in RTM in the following way:

1. Important and urgent
2. Important and not urgent
3. Urgent and not important
4. Not urgent and not important

While creating tasks, I assign priorities using the above inference. The idea is to work off important tasks first.

Second, I name lists in ascending order of importance in my life. So this would look something like this:

• 1-Personal
• 2-Study
• 3-Project A
• 4-Project B

And so on.

When using ascending sort, this ensures I work off projects that are of more importance to me.

Next level of sort criteria is due date – straight forward.

You can add another layer – like date added, to ensure you complete tasks that are hanging around for longer than the more recently added ones.

So overall my custom sort order would look like:

• Sort by – priority – ascending
• Then by – list – ascending
• Then by – due date – ascending
• Then by – added date – ascending

Work off tasks from top to bottom of the sorted list and embrace productivity!

Thanks for sharing this tip, hiteshnh! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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