Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Using priority instead of due dates

Perhaps after last week’s tip, you realize how often you postpone some of your tasks. This week’s tip, shared by graham.poulter, offers an alternative: using priorities to help you decide what to do on a given day.

For a long time I would set due:today on the things I wanted to do next, and the next day postpone the ones I didn’t do. Most of the tasks don’t really have an externally imposed due date and kept getting postponed every day until I got to them.

My tip is to take off the due dates and use priorities to create a “Next” Smart List (priority:1), an “Upcoming list” of all priorities (NOT priority:N), and a “Backlog” list (priority:N) of non-prioritised items.

The “Next” list can be extended to also include items with a real due date (real consequences for missing it) in the near future:

priority:1 OR dueWithin:“3 weeks of today” OR dueBefore:today

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

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