Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Creating a development-style "sprint" with a Smart List that has a deadline

Sometimes you can have your head down working day to day so much that you feel like you don’t get to your projects or longer-term tasks. This week’s tip, shared by benjjj6, offers a way to break that up: take two weeks at your convenience and borrow a concept from software development to “sprint” to the finish with everything completed.

To try and break my workload into manageable sections of time where I do not over commit, I create two week sprints.

1. Create a Smart List which is set for tasks due two weeks in the future.
2. Any tasks which are due by that date are automatically included in the sprint.
3. I then review each of my lists and drag the items I want to accomplish within this Sprint into this Smart List. This automatically adds the end of the Sprint as the due date.

This means during those two weeks all I have to do is look at the Smart List. When the two weeks is over you can go to the Completed tab and view what you achieved.

Lists can be feature, projects, bugs and ranked by priority or expected time and effort. Create a recurring task to Plan and Review the sprints.

This way of sectioning off selected tasks into a manageable block is what helped me achieve more.

I hope that helps! :D

Thanks for sharing this tip, benjjj6! 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.