Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Reducing your overall number of tasks

You could argue that to-do lists are revolving by nature: as soon as you clear it, another day arrives and there’s more to do. Some days may feel like 2 steps forward and 3 steps back.

This week’s tip, shared by byronsp, brings a different perspective into the mix by looking at how many tasks you’ve added versus how many you’ve completed.

After a while I felt the number of tasks was going up and I wanted to reduce the structural deficit of the tasks (e.g non-repeating tasks).

So what I did is created a Smart List to track the tasks I’ve added today VS the tasks I’ve managed to cross off today.

(added:today or completed:today) and isRepeating:false

This allows me to say that I’ve added 4 tasks today BUT reduced the structural deficit by completing 8 tasks. Hence I’m down 4 tasks. Then I create a repeating task (I use tags:++Objective and Priority HIGH) to reduce each day the deficit by 5 tasks.

Just my current approach for getting motivated to crank out those small project tasks I’ve got lying around.

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

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