Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Reusable lists and archiving tags

‘Tis the season for lists… and since holiday lists come up year after year, we thought we’d share a timely tip shared by winterkitten. Of course, this tip can be used all year long; it’s the gift that keeps on giving!

Last year I made up a list of people to whom I wanted to send Christmas cards. I created a tag called “.cards” to keep it all in one place (btw I use “.” to denote a short project and “+” to denote an ongoing one).

Once done, I realised that I could use this as reusable list for later this year. All I needed to do was search for tag:.cards and click on completed, select all, uncomplete them and I have my list of people to send cards to again next year.

The same technique can be used for any list that you want to reuse. The only problem is that RTM’s autocomplete will still bring up the tag when entering new project tags. When I type in “.” I only want to see current projects not projects I’m going to reuse in the future.

Fortunately, this is easily solved. Just go into Settings/Tags and change the tag prefix from “.” (or whatever it is that you’re using) to something else to indicate it is archived/on hold. I went with “º” (Mac: Opt-0) as it sorts near the end so gets it out of the way (ºcards).

When you want to reuse the list, just change the prefix back to whatever you use for current projects (or remove it if you don’t use prefixes for current projects). Search for the tag, uncomplete the actions and you’re ready to go.

Thanks for sharing this tip, winterkitten! 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.