Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Start dates + Smart Lists = Getting Things Done
GTD posts have been a popular niche for our Tips & Tricks Tuesday posts. They end up being very interesting because they demonstrate different ways to organize your tasks based on GTD principles.
This week’s tip is no different! Here’s a very thorough GTD setup driven primarily by start dates and Smart Lists, with a thorough explanation for how to use it. Thanks for sharing!
Hello, I’ve been a Pro User now for about a year and wanted to share with everyone how I’ve set up my GTD methodology within RTM.
A couple of things to note about my approach to GTD… I am a user of Start Dates, and having a Start Date field is one of the main reasons I’m a RTM user as most other apps out there only have Due Date. For me, there are a lot of things that I have to do, but I can’t start them until a specific date in the future. Hence, I use the Start Date field to capture the date I want to “start” working on them. Until that date, I don’t want to see the action on my Next Actions list. So as you will see below with my set up, Start Date (or Start After Today) is a key query item for my set up.
Second note, I use a “Focus” Smart List. This Smart List is the list that I work from 95% of my day. The Focus Smart List is a hack that I set up within RTM using the Priority Field. RTM uses 4 levels of Priority (none, 3, 2, and 1 with 1 being the highest priority). So my hack is that Priority Level 1 are those things that I chose to work on today. I then use Priority Level 2 to denote any “important” tasks that I need to keep my eye on, but other than that I don’t use the Priority feature.
Continue reading this tip on the forum, and learn the lists, tags, Smart Lists, and process flow used for this GTD set up!
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.
