Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Killing zombies—zombie tasks, that is!

Particularly if you have an ultra-organized system for your tasks, you may miss a task a time or two. This week’s tip, shared by 7ohnf1ne, shows you how to find anything that slips through the cracks and file it away for later.

“Zombie” tasks, for me, are tasks that I will probably never complete after creating them. Either I’ll never see them again, because I forgot to tag them and I always review tasks starting from the tag cloud; or I’ll never complete them because they don’t have a due date and I only focus on tasks that are coming due soon.

I should never create “Zombie” tasks at all, but you know how things go… sometimes you get sloppy.

To kill “zombie” tasks, I created a Smart List called Zombie with tasks matching:

isTagged:false OR due:never

My goal is for this list to be EMPTY. Once in a while, I look at this list and try to get it to be empty by assigning tasks in this list either a tag or a due date if either is missing. (Tasks need both a tag and a due date to vanish from this list.)

If I can’t figure out what the tag or due date for a task should be then I delete it, because I don’t really need to do it!

Thanks for sharing this tip, 7ohnf1ne! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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