Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Creating a travel checklist template

Traveling comes with its own sets of tasks, particularly around packing and preparing for the trip. This week’s tip, shared by jondcoleman, offers a handy template for preparing, with one extra twist: using Smart Add to put the dates in as needed.

I travel for work about twice a month and there’s always around a dozen tasks I don’t want to forget for each trip. As soon as I know about the trip, I want to put the tasks for that trip into RTM.

So what I’ve done is create a template (just in a text file) like this:

Update personal and travel calendar for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[now]
Book flight for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[now]
Book lodging for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[now]
Coordinate airport transportation for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[now]
Book ground transportation for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[now]
Set out of office Outlook message for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[before]
Update calendar for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[before]
Pass off responsibilities/meetings as needed for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[before]
Enable Zendesk Out of Office for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[before]
Set Slack Message for for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[before]
Set reminder to get gas for rental car for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[before]
Disable Zendesk Out of Office for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[after]
Complete expense report for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[after]
Process notes/followup for [tripname] trip #@computer #Work ^[after]

Then, for each trip, I can simply do a find/replace for four things:

[tripname]
[now] = date for currently due tasks
[before] = date a few days before the trip
[after] = date after trip

Once I’ve done that, I use the email import feature to import the list.

Thanks for sharing this tip, jondcoleman! 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.