Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Keep your tasks rolling with a rolling list

If you like to plan your tasks very specifically, organizing and prioritizing them can feel like enough. With this week’s tip, shared by keithhen, it actually is: once the tasks are prioritized and dated, this Smart List will keep you apprised of your current tasks, and will automatically update too.

I manage a variety of different projects and people inside and outside my company. I kept finding it difficult to keep my priorities in the front of my head while still knocking out the smaller stuff that pops up on a daily basis. I created what I call the “rolling list”. I made a Smart List that pulls the following items:

priority:1 OR priority:2 OR priority:3 OR list:Inbox OR dueBefore:tomorrow

This query pulls anything from all of my lists that I have assigned a priority, anything new that I have added to the inbox, and anything that is due today or overdue. On a daily basis I work from this list and it allows me to effectively prioritize my work across a variety of projects and people.

Each Monday I review all of my projects and assign a priority to things I want to get done. They populate to this list and it gives me a clear daily/weekly agenda. I also have a list of habits that populate on the due day. When I complete them on my rolling list they go away and appear at the next scheduled time.

Bonus: I use my start dates like a tickler/reminder system. Each night I review my rolling list, and search start:tomorrow. I can then review that list, add a priority if I want it to show up on my main list, or set a new start date for a future time.

Bonus Bonus: I use tags for people. Each task will have a tag for one or more people. Before I walk into a meeting I’ll do a quick tag search for each person that will be in the room and I get a quick rundown of what I’m waiting for from them. You’d be amazed how much gets done when I catch up with someone after a meeting and say, “Hey, just checking in on these three things”.

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

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