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From day to day, it can be difficult to decide which tasks to work on, especially if your day can change!

This week’s tip comes from jansona, who suggests a simple system to be able to “bubble up” tasks or to—shall we say—"float them away" based on the priority.

My RTM system is GTD-inspired; I wanted a simple way to plan out my day, while avoiding time-consuming tag/list changes. The three core tenants of my system:

1. I use a unique tag for each project.

2. I use priorities to bubble tasks upward to higher levels of visibility. Hotkeys make this very fast.
- No priority: A task that will get attention, some day.
- Priority 3: A “next action” for a project. Most projects have one, occasionally two next actions.
- Priority 2: Tasks I’m dedicating time to today/soon.
- Priority 1: Tasks in progress. (includes delegated, waiting on, etc.)

3. I have my main list include all tasks due/overdue and all tasks with any priority level, and sort that by priority.

(dueBefore:tomorrow OR priority:1 OR priority:2 OR priority:3)

This means that most of my day is spent on a single list, and that list is color-coded so that I can focus on small bits at a time, greatly reducing my mental space. Tasks bubble upward through quick presses of 3, 2, and 1.

During my morning, I spend a few minutes reviewing the entire list, and promote “next actions” to priority 2 until I feel I have an appropriate amount of work for the day. I also mark due tasks as priority 2. (or postpone, etc.) Now, as I need work to do, I pick a priority 2 task, mark it as priority 1, complete it, then move on. If a task becomes stuck (waiting on an email reply, delegated to a coworker, waiting on a program to run, etc.) then I can start a second task and still remember the first. If I run out of priority 2s, I can promote more “next actions”. In this way, tasks bubble up the sorted list, and I can focus my attention on a small portion of my todo list at any time.

The only time I need to visit other lists is to move more tasks from “no priority” to a higher priority. How often I do this depends on the project; some projects I do this whenever a task is completed, others I don’t bother until my weekly review period. Moving tasks to the main list is as simple as pressing “3”. :)

Thanks for sharing your tip, jansona! 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.

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Gift time around birthdays and holidays can be really tricky: “Wait, what do they want?” or “Wait, what do I want?”

This week’s tip from adamrakich is beautiful in its simplicity: keep track of gifts for the right occasion, whether you’re shopping for someone else or someone else is asking what you want. 😅

I use RTM for a lot of “I need this but not now” use cases, but one I get a lot of use out of is listing future gifts.

For my wife and my son - they mention something they like, but birthday/Christmas not for a long time? On the list, and I can consult it at the right time.

And actually just as much for me - I’m hard to buy for sometimes, so when I see something I like but I’m not going to get for myself - on the list, and when my wife comes asking for ideas, I’m ready to go!

Thanks for sharing your tip, adamrakich! 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.

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Finding your older tasks can be very helpful: “Oh, that’s easy to do now!” or “I can check this off because I did something different since then.”

mjbenoit asked a specific question about this: How do I find tasks that haven’t been updated, and may need to be worked on or completed, etc.? And the best part is that the resulting Smart List doesn’t even need to be managed: the tasks will appear and disappear automatically just by using the apps.

The following should give you something like that:

NOT addedWithin:“1 month of Today” AND NOT updatedWithin:“1 month of Today”

So the added date is before 1 month ago, and the updated date is before then too.

Thanks for inspiring this tip, mjbenoit! 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.

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Managing projects usually means a lot of tasks, so any way to make keeping track of them smoother is very helpful.

Cue this week’s tip from drfrankbuck that starts with a simple premise: a project is just a task with subtasks. Then, with one Smart List, each of your projects is available from a single view and digging in is one step away.

(Subtasks require a Pro account.)

For those who have been influenced by GTD and want to have a “Projects” list that maintains itself, here you go:

1. For me, I start a new “project” by simply creating a new task.
2. I list the individual steps towards completing the project as subtasks under the parent.
3. As a one-time setup, search for tasks that have subtasks. Those are your projects. Save that search as a Smart List. Name it something like “Projects-All.”
4. Any time you want to see a list of all your projects, click on the Smart List in the sidebar.
5. When you complete a project, you simply check off the parent. It will no longer show up when you click the “Projects-All” Smart List. No manual updating to be done!
6. Let’s take it one step further. I usually want to see all the projects I am working on NOW. The thing they will have in common is that they have a due date within the next week. I created another Smart List for “Projects-This Week.” It has these attributes: hasSubtasks:true AND dueBefore:“8 day from now”
7. I also have a Smart List that shows projects for later this month and another for projects more than a month in the future, but those are other tips for other days! 🙂

Thanks for sharing your tip, drfrankbuck! 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.

Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Stress-free is the way 

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Staring down a long list in a given day can feel intimidating, even if it’s a reasonable number of tasks.

In this week’s tip, fant suggests an easy way to pace yourself: show tasks only as their due time approaches. That way you can focus on just the tasks that are coming up. 😅

In the day view, I find it a bit stressful to see tasks that aren’t due until the evening.

So I created a Smart List, surprisingly called “today”, which contains the following part in the query:

AND (dueBefore:“6 hours of now”) AND NOT due:tom

For tasks like taking pills this evening, I set a due time. This has two advantages:

a) I’m not confronted with tasks that aren’t due until the evening every time I look at today’s list.

b) I receive a notification on my smartphone.

Of course, the time at which the task is to be shown can be set as desired. After some trial, I set 6 hours.

A second Smart List called “upcoming” shows all today’s tasks and the tasks for the next 10 days. Just to get an overview of what’s coming up in the course of the day and the next few days. Alternatively, the built-in list “This Week” can do the same.

Thanks for sharing your tip, fant! 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.

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The best to-do list is the one you can take with you… and sometimes that means “data portability”.

While a full account backup is available in JSON format, a lightweight CSV can be an appealing option at other times. “Why not both?”

This week’s tip features a MilkScript that evanhahn cooked up to generate a CSV for selected tasks. Quick and convenient!

(MilkScript requires a Pro account.)

I built a basic version of CSV export using MilkScript. If you want to analyze your tasks in tools like Excel, now you can.

Here’s a video showing how it works.

To set this up, create a MilkScript containing all this code. Then you can select one or more tasks to be downloaded as CSV when you run the script.

Check out my blog post for more details.

Thanks for sharing your tip, evanhahn! 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.

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Wanting revenge is a common feeling, but acting on it is (just maybe) not always for the best.

This week’s tip comes from countdiso, who plots a course for all of us through common scenarios of revenge. The key is… waiting! Delay your response and you may find you choose a different reaction. 😉

Revenge is a dish best served… later, much later.

Life can be a rollercoaster of emotions. Someone cuts you up in traffic, or perhaps they take the last gluten-free option at the bakery, or someone ghosts you after two months of messaging like you’re having the wildest love affair of your life. Your natural instinct is to exact swift and sweet revenge, but as someone wise (probably a villain) once said, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” In the world of task management, I say it’s a dish best served… much, much later. Enter Remember The Milk—your handy tool for the pettiest form of delayed vengeance imaginable.

Now, before you start plotting your evil plans, we need to talk about timelines. Just how much did this sting?

Why don’t we break it down?

The Rude Co-Worker: Your co-worker did suggest that maybe you’re “too old” for TikTok. Start date: six months. By the time this task pops up, TikTok will be obsolete, and you’ll be busy mastering whatever the next social media fad is.

The Car Crash: Someone bumped into your car, and they did a bit of damage—not much, they even gave you some cash for it, but it still doesn’t make it right. Make that a two-year reminder. Two years later, you’ll be driving a new car and won’t even remember what the old one looked like.

The Broken Heart: Ah, the deep wounds. For a breakup that made you question if love is just a made-up word that other people use but never you, set a solid 10-year due date. Trust me, when this pops up, you’ll laugh because you’ve already moved on, or, you know, your ex is getting married and they’ll get a real shock that ten years later you turned up with a paintball gun to ruin their wedding dress.

But here’s the kicker—when these tasks finally arrive and you open up Remember The Milk, you’ll realise that you’ve evolved beyond the need for revenge. You’ve lived, laughed, loved (or at least eaten enough takeaways to fill the void), and life has gone on. You’ll check it off your list, not with malice, but with the ultimate sense of victory: You don’t care anymore. Oh, and over the years when people have wronged you all you’ve done is give them a cheeky wink, and said “I want you to remember this moment and think carefully about it on..” checks phone “the 29th of May 2037”. Trust me, they will be worried.

Not reacting straight away will make you a much better person because revenge, dear reader, isn’t about acting on your anger. It’s about realising, many months or years later, that you’ve grown past it. And nothing, not even revenge, is more satisfying than that little “ding!” when you check off a completed task in Remember The Milk.

Thanks for sharing your tip, countdiso! 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.

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For a certain kind of task, you may add it and imagine that you’ll remember later what “Download PDF from website” means. But you may return to it and think, “Well where was I supposed to click? I don’t see it now.”

For this kind of task, pelowski recommends a straightforward solution: screencasting. Using a simple tool to record a short video clip of your steps can help you retrace your steps. You can link to that clip in your task and get right back to it later.

One of the things that I sometimes do with tasks that involve work on websites, or with the computer, is to create a quick screencast of what I’m thinking of doing, and then linking that to the task itself. When you click the share button in the screencast app, it uploads the video or image to a server and then posts the URL back to your clipboard. Then I just visit RTM create a quick task and then paste that URL for the hyperlink. Now I have both a task with some thoughts that I quickly recorded in a video format to watch later!

Thanks for sharing your tip, pelowski! 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.

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Keeping in touch with people takes a bit of effort, conscious or not. Here's a quick tip from patch to use tags and repeating tasks to stay in regular touch with friends and family, and to keep notes so you remember what you want to talk about.

Let’s say you want to remember to tell your dad to Remember The Milk or whatever next time you see him. You also want to talk to him about that book about Spain you saw. And you want to ask him something about something you got to do for work.

Oh and you want to remind yourself to call your aunt Mary, let’s say, every 12 weeks or whatever.

So you create two tasks: “Communication: Dad” and “Communication: Aunt Mary”. Tag the first one with §dad and the second one with §aunt-mary (you see: § is for people here).

The second task should appear when it’s due in your email Smart List, so you also tag it with @call. When sometime during the 12 weeks you think of something you should tell her, just write it into the notes of the Aunt-Mary-task.

The first task might also be tagged with @call, as maybe you want to call him when you got the time and you write the milk and the book-about-Spain-stuff into the notes, too.

But more important: tag the task that represents the something you have to do for work (yes, of course you already have an RTM task for that!) with §dad. An hour or so before you’re gonna meet him, click the §dad tag in the tag list and all tasks about which you plan to talk to him are going to appear.

Thanks for sharing your tip, patch! 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.

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Juggling the email and tasks all week can be a lot. Anything to make that easier is a big help!

This week’s tip comes from dougbrown77, who shares a quick way to add a follow-up task when you are using email. A quick forward, a quick tag, and you have a task + note ready and waiting when you need to follow up.

One of the valuable features of RTM is the ability to have multiple notes for each task. This feature is helpful in a number of ways.

For example, an item may be of ongoing concern and regular followup may be necessary. I have a tag #followup and have made that tag a “favorite”. I am able to quickly view all items that need regular followup. As I follow up, I am able to insert a new note and RTM automatically stamps that note with date and time.

I also forward emails to my unique RTM email address and I include #followup in the subject line along with a date if needed. These emails will automatically appear in the #followup “favorite”.

RTM’s handy search feature allows me to perform a search of all tasks, and there is a check box in the search box that expands the search to notes. This is very handy if one is not sure of where to find the task.

Thanks for sharing your tip, dougbrown77! 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.