Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Separating timed and untimed tasks with Smart Lists

Managing your tasks can be an all-day affair… particularly if you use your tasks to manage your day! :) This week’s tip, shared by robert.ward, offers a helpful process for managing some tasks at specific times and others more generally throughout the day.

A lot of my daily repeating work tasks are little items but they have to be done, so I don’t want to miss them. Because of this I have them due at specific times. But they would sometimes get lost in the mix of the rest of my tasks for the day with higher priorities. And at other times they would annoy me because I couldn’t do them yet, but they were still hanging out there on my list.

Inspired by the Tips and Tricks post about creating a “Snooze Smart List”, I created two Smart Lists for work. One is for tasks due today with a specific time. The other is tasks due today without a specific time.

The search for each is as follows:

• Tasks with a specific time: list:work AND ((dueBefore:now AND NOT dueBefore:“today 12:01AM”) OR (due:today AND dueAfter:now))
• Tasks due today with no set time (note that the list “WkToday” Smart List is the search above): NOT list:WkToday AND due:today AND list:work

Now I can look at each list individually and knock out my time sensitive tasks first, then go focus on other tasks for the day.

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

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