Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Using time estimates to make the most of free time

When you have a few minutes to get something done, looking at your lists can be a bit daunting – “what to do in the next 10 minutes?” This week’s tip, shared by hwebbjr, suggests a quick search to find tasks that take only as much time as you have.

As the day progresses, meetings get cancelled, phone calls take more or less time than projected, people are late to meetings, etc., resulting in unforeseen discretionary time of various durations.

Since I enter a time estimate for each and every task that I enter into RTM, I use this quick search to generate a list of tasks that will fit into the newly discovered available time:

location:work AND timeEstimate:"15 min"

This gives me all work-related tasks that will fit exactly into 15 minutes. Change the available time in the search string to generate tasks of different durations.

location:work AND timeEstimate:"<31 min"

This results in all work-related tasks of durations between 1 minute to 30 min. This gives me more options: 1 task of 30 minutes, two 15-minute tasks, three 10-minute tasks, etc.

The major benefit is that I don’t lose time THINKING about the tasks because RTM does that for me, leaving me with more time to DO the tasks.

Thanks for sharing this tip, hwebbjr! 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.