Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Planning for annual events

The holidays and New Year are a great time for planning out your annual events—'tis the season! This week’s tip comes from raymond.finn who suggests keeping a list of tasks around a specific event, and completing and archiving the list when the event is done. That feels very reminiscent to unpacking and putting away holiday decorations too… but less dusty.

With Christmas fast approaching, I thought I would share a very simple thing I do when it comes to getting ready for Annual events (or even any project that recurs time and again).

For each event I create its own list. For the first time through, I create tasks as and when I need them then complete them as and when I can. Once the event is over and done with, I archive it off so I don’t have it think about it anymore until next time.

When its time to start thinking about the event again, I take it off archive and simply uncomplete all the tasks. I now have a starting list of tasks which I can amend, delete or add to as I like.

This means for this Christmas I already have a set of tasks including who to buy presents for, who to send cards to (with addresses ready in the notes section), what preparations I have to make for Christmas dinner and so on.

Once Christmas is over I can archive it off until next year and unarchive off the next event such as my wife’s birthday, Valentines day, our wedding anniversary or our summer holiday – all with a starting set of tasks ready to go.

Thanks for sharing this tip, raymond.finn! 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.