Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Focus on your doable tasks with a 'now' tag

I think many of us can relate to having long lists of tasks – various projects, “anytime” tasks, and things we want to get to eventually. :) This week’s tip, shared by pauldb, suggests a quick way to focus only on what you can do now, or at least have chosen to do now.

All week long I add and schedule tasks for the coming weekend - things I just won’t have time for during the week. So when Saturday rolls around, I may have 30 or more tasks of varying levels of priority. Maybe one top priority is to go to the grocery store for… milk. But as long as I’m out, I can also stop at Staples for…staples, and pick up stamps at the post office, and drop off a hat my kid’s friend left at our house. These other tasks were low priorities, but they were each things I could do today.

Now that I’m going out, I scan through my tasks for the day, select all of them (whether on the web, iphone or iPad) and group-edit the tags for each, adding the tag “now” for each of them. So now while I’m out running my errands, I am displaying all tasks tagged as “now,” and see just the five things I decided to do while I’m out. It gets the other 25 out of the way, whether they are otherwise a high or low priority. I can mark “complete” or delete them one-by-one and return home with a blank screen. Very satisfying.

Thanks for sharing this tip, pauldb! 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.