Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Decide the fate of your tasks

If you ever worry about a stack of old tasks that you haven’t dealt with, this week’s tip might help you clear those out. fant suggests a staged approach, deciding with tags about tasks before finally axing them if you never get to them.

“To shrug it all off and wipe it clean–every annoyance and distraction–and reach utter stillness.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

Do you have the same experience as me? Tasks pile up inexorable…

One advantage of impermanence is that this also applies to tasks. And the other advantage is that RTM has a mighty query feature (aka Smart Lists).

Here is my pretty simple tip for how to get rid of “persistent” tasks:

Requirements

Tags: 🐌 (snail) , 💀 (skull)
Smart List: 💨 dusty
Query:

list:# AND due:never AND start:never NOT updatedWithin:"2 weeks of today"

Note: In my setup, the list “#” (used in the query) is a Smart List which contains only actionable tasks, so called “next actions”.

Process

• Review the list every week or so (e.g., weekly review).
• Tasks not touched within 2 weeks will appear.
• Tasks which have none of the tags above get the tag 🐌 (snail).
• The tagged tasks will vanish from this Smart List, and you can can identify them in your other lists as the slow ones.
• If these snail-tagged tasks are not touched again for 2 weeks they will reappear. Change the tag to / or add the tag 💀 (skull).
• Now, you can identify tasks in your lists which are about to vanish soon.
• Task appearing in this Smart List which already have the tag 💀 (skull) get done immediately, get rephrased/broken down in smaller ones or you bury them with deep grief. I like the last…

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

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