Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Find your focus with MilkScript
Sometimes you know what you want to work on and you just need a little nudge; other times you need to make sure you don’t forget about a few things before the end of the day.
This week’s tip comes from fabianhemmert, who shares a dual-purpose Smart List for Pro users: throughout the day it uses MilkScript and IFTTT to change the criteria to suit your intended focus.
(MilkScript and IFTTT require a Pro account.)
Extra tip: you can customize the criteria within the MilkScript to set up the Smart List you want to use. 😎
Today, I’d like to share how I use MilkScript to improve my focus.
During the day, I want to focus until the most important things on my to do list. However, during the last hour of the working day, I want to focus on different things: less important, more paperwork-style, things that, if they pile up, would become a stressor.
So, I developed a system of a Smart List that changes its contents over the course of a day.
To achieve this, I wrote two MilkScripts, which I trigger with a timer (in my case, with IFTTT, which has a simple ‘clock’ trigger. I trigger it at 0:05am, the daily reset, and at 3:00pm, to switch the focus to the lower-priority tasks). Here are my two scripts:
The Daily Reset (run at 0:05am):
const focusList = rtm.getSmartLists().find(smartList => smartList.getName() === ‘Focus’);
focusList.setFilter('dueBefore:tomorrow AND NOT list:WaitingFor AND NOT tag:afternoon AND NOT tag:evening AND NOT tag:mail AND NOT priority:none AND NOT priority:3’);
The Last Hour (run at 15:00):
const focusList = rtm.getSmartLists().find(smartList => smartList.getName() === 'Focus’);
focusList.setFilter('dueBefore:tomorrow’);
I also figured out that I’m an avid postponer of things: I want to see many tasks I could do today, but I often simply leave things for tomorrow.
To accomodate for that, and to avoid me having to postpone all things from yesterday to today, I wrote another MilkScript:
Bonus: Postpone everything to today that’s overdue:
const tasks = rtm.getTasks('status:incomplete and dueBefore:today’);
console.log('Incomplete tasks due today: %d’, tasks.length);
tasks.forEach(function(element, index) {
console.log('Element: ’ + element.getName() + ’ at Index: ’ + index);
element.postpone()
});
… it will take all overdue tasks and simply move them to today. (Of course, that means that I’ll have to know myself which one of them is *really* due today…)
Thanks for sharing your tip, fabianhemmert! 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.
