Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Creating "bucket lists" for better living

If you use Remember The Milk to keep track of everything, you may want to create a Smart List for those less urgent tasks that would be satisfying to complete. This week’s tip, shared by lon247, highlights a way to create so-called bucket lists:

There are things that I’ve always wanted to do (and often forget about) that really don’t take long - that are non-urgent but I’d deem important in the end of it all.

ie. reading a certain short story with my daughter, or getting together with a certain set of old friends. It doesn’t need to get done, but when I’ve got a block of time, and I don’t feel like being in the zone and productive, I’d love to have a list of stuff that actually brings joy to my life.

I’m trying keep a simple habit of making a note of duration with the = Smart Add, ie.

watch particular TED video =20 min #backburner

or

research and plan skydiving trip for our anniversary =2 hr #backburner

My backburner list includes more serious projects, but it’s generally stuff without a due date.

And then the magic happens with the Smart Lists.

I have bucket list 1 for fun things I’ve wanted to do under 30 minutes:

timeEstimate:“< 31min” AND list:backburner

and one for under 3 hours:

timeEstimate:“< 181min” AND list:backburner

I couldn’t find a less than or equal to operator, and by convention I’d usually type 30 minutes or 3hr - Remember The Milk translates that 181 minutes into 3 hours and 1 minutes for you.

And voila - lists for all the non-urgent stuff you always wanted to do before you ‘kick the bucket’!

Thanks for sharing this tip, lon247! 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.