Tips & Tricks Tuesday: The power of tagContains

The advanced search operators in Remember The Milk can be pretty powerful – particularly when used in a Smart List, as in this excellent example shared by sylviavas.

I’ve gone from using regular lists almost exclusively to using tags and Smart Lists - they’re so versatile. But I have a lots of tasks that aren’t necessarily “real” tasks. Things like grocery items, etc. These, I don’t want to see on my main list.

For these tasks, I have multiple tags such as “+grocery”, “+packing” and “+waiting”.

Notice that they all start with a plus sign? That’s to make them easier to exclude from my main Smart Lists. So, instead of using this to exclude from the main Smart Lists:

not tag:someday and not tag:grocery and not tag:packing

I just use this:

not tagContains:+

This excludes all my items that aren’t real “tasks”, in one fell swoop.

Thanks for sharing this tip, sylviavas! 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.