Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Organizing your tasks and your day as projects

If you find yourself churning through your tasks on auto-pilot it may help to take a step back and to get some bigger-picture perspective.

riazullah suggests this week reviewing your tasks and reorganizing them as projects for an easier overview… and possibly even a clearer idea about what to do from day to day!

I used to monitor a master list of to-do items that I struggled to prioritize on a daily basis.

After reading/listening to some productivity advice, I have been tracking my projects instead of to-do lists. In essence, the approach is to review all open projects on a daily basis and identify one or two activities on a daily basis that need to be accomplished that day in order to make progress on one or more projects. This project based approach helps me pick the most valuable task that will move my projects closer to completion.

There are two ways to accomplish this in RTM.
1) You can create each of your projects as a list. Tasks per project go to the relevant list.
2) The approach that I have adapted is to create lists for active projects and passive projects. Then, add each project as a task within that list. You can then list subtasks within each of these projects. A Pro account will help to track each of these subtasks with a due date, priority etc.

Some of my projects are: Career progression, Sell home, Author a book, Trip to France and India.

The nice thing with RTM is you can still look at your master list of tasks in a snap just by selecting the ‘All tasks’ option. Hence the change shouldn’t be hard. Give it a try and share your feedback.

Thanks for sharing this tip, riazullah! 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.