Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Making a comprehensive holiday gift list

Holiday gift shopping can be a stressful time, but it can help to be organized. This week’s tip, shared by carolsher, helps you through the whole process: making a list, getting ideas, and doing the shopping.

I’ve been using Remember The Milk to help me manage my Holiday gift shopping for a number of years now. This is how it works.

First of all, I have a task list called “present ideas”.

This is a list of ideas for gifts that I keep up to date through the year. Ideas for specific people are tagged with that person’s name. Ideas - such as “woolly hats” - that might suit a lot of different people are tagged as “general”. I use the notes feature to store more details about the idea, such as particular styles of hat, shops to visit or links to websites.

At the start of my Christmas shopping each year, I create a list, e.g. “xmas-2015”. This list will contain an entry for each person I want to give a gift to, with the recipient’s name at the start of the subject line.

I use my “present ideas” list to help me populate this list with gifts for each person. But when I haven’t yet got an idea for that person, I create an entry just containing their name. This helps me to focus on them and start coming up with ideas.

I can then easily create tags to help organise my shopping trips, or to let me see what status a gift is currently at, for example “local-bookshop” or “on order”.

So whenever I am out and about, I always have my list with me on my phone and can make the best use of any quick shopping opportunities. Or for really hard-core trips into the shops, I print out the list so I can scribble on it as I go around.

I end up with a handy archive of the gifts I gave each year, which makes it easier not to give people the same thing over and over again!

As I complete a gift, I tag that gift as “DONE”. Then I can create a Smart List for my shopping list:

list:xmas-2015 AND NOT tag:DONE

Happy Holidays everyone!

Thanks for sharing this tip, carolsher! 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.