Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Using tags to organize groups of tasks

Tags are one of our favorite features for organizing tasks. This week’s tip, shared by reconfiguring, shows a few ways of using tags very effectively to organize groups of tasks – for specific meetings, but also as a means of categorizing tasks more generally too.

As I have to manage attendance and input to a lot of project meetings, I have developed an RTM system of tags that helps me to achieve this. To illustrate, lets consider 3 Projects called Red, Green and Blue. Each of these projects has various supporting meetings such as Project Reviews, Risk Meetings and Design Meetings. Now when I come across an issue that I need to raise in one of these meetings I just tag it with a “Mtg_ProjectName_MtgName” tag such as mtg_red_risk. Now I can use the tag to quickly find items for that meeting either in advance, or during the meeting.

Better still, by using the tagContains: search operator, I can also set up Smart Lists to quickly show me all items for a given set of meetings, e.g. tagContains:“mtg_blue_” to allow me to prep for meetings. By also setting due dates to the date of the meeting I can produce a really powerful set of views that allow me to prepare much better in advance.

Finally, I also have a mtg_action tag that I can apply to tasks that fall out of actions given to me in meetings which again allows to be quickly sort and search and ensure I have done what I need to do. Hope this is of interest.

Thanks for sharing this tip, reconfiguring! 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.