Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Spend less time categorizing your tasks with keyword-based Smart Lists

It can be easy to over-organize your tasks in an effort to stay as organized as possible. If this is your tendency, you may appreciate this week’s tip, shared by dougbrown77, which offers a refreshingly simple way to keep organized lists of tasks.

I found some time ago that I am prone to spend too much time categorizing tasks so that I may at some future point focus on those items. Remember The Milk’s Smart Lists have helped me spend less time on categorizing which gives more time to actually do the things I need to do.

I use key words such as buy, call, visit, follow up, write etc. as basic categories. I have set up Smart Lists that search my tasks for these words and then display tasks with that word. For example, the Smart List buy will show me all the tasks with the word “buy”. This allows me to concentrate on things that I need to buy.

Now the fun part, whether I am using Siri or Smart Add I can just input the words “buy tomatoes” and that item will show itself in the buy list.

Of course, I can add more categories and tags but I find that for most items this is enough information.

Thanks for sharing this tip, dougbrown77! 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.