Hi, there! I see forum is too quiet, so I’ll revive it a little. Sorry for my english and too much text 🙂

I used RTM for couple years, but when my subscription expired, decided to give a chance to few other apps. And after few months of futile attempts (and all other attempts in previous years with dozen other apps), I realized that, despite lack of some features in RTM, none of that apps can compete with RTM in ease of use and speed, when you have a lot of tasks/ideas and don’t want to waste a lot of time for planning and reordering tasks.

I like to use RTM like a digital notepad (as it looks like, not accidently), where I can write smth fast, and edit all of this after, VERY fast and comfortable, especially with mass editing, and decide what to do in real time, using couple smart lists.

So, I decided to come back to RTM and want to share how I use it after a myriad of experiments with apps and planning systems. I found, that the most FREE approach is the best for me, so I can focus on doing, rather than overplanning and provoke excessive thoroughness and perfectionism.

1. Inbox and Work_Inbox: (from GTD, but without any obligations to sort it every week). Most of ideas come to my mind goes there. I have a repeated task to sort it, but, honestly I do it only with urgent items, that I mark as due tomorrow when creating, and “Work_Inbox” items. I hope someday I‘ll get to other items, but probably it is a pipe dream, because I don’t have solution at the moment, how to sort all of thousands old items, so they just keep accumulating like a journal of my old ideas, and only RTM has no problem with that :) (limits or big lags in other apps)

2. Lists: I have a lot of lists for every project, groups of some theme related tasks and so on. It’s one of the problem with RTM, that we have no nested lists, or just one level of folders and I see too much lists. Partial solution is to divide it in groups by some empty lists called as smth like “——————” and call like “Work_Theme1”, “Work_Theme2” and so on

3. Due dates: I put Today due date for every actual task, that I want or need to do in the nearest days/weeks, so I don’t use Today list as a list of tasks that I MUST do today, but as a list of tasks, that I MAY do today. It is usual for me to have 100-150 or more tasks there. It can look too much, but for me it is way more comfortable, than to force myself to give up tasks, that can’t “fit” in my day and to suffer that I need to postpone it every day. I prefer to have a little hope, that I can do some of them today if I have time, and start to do most important tasks faster and not so thoroughly, where it is acceptable. At the end of the day, I just postpone everything to tomorrow. It is so easy in RTM

4. Priorities:
1. I use p1 for tasks that I really need to do today (and morning tasks to see them at the top) or feel I don’t want to postpone it for ever one more day, and it could be about 10-20 tasks, but I can do only 3, 5 or 10. I just try to start from most important and urgent of it and that’s ok if I don’t do all of them.
2. p2 is for more or less urgent tasks, that I want to do in in the coming days or to switch to a different type of tasks spontaneously today
3. p3 all other tasks
4. p4 for routines with time, like reminders to take a pill

5. Tags: I use tags for contexts to filter tasks in smartlists:
1. City (tasks in the city)
2. Phone (what can I do with my phone or which I want to see when I with my phone)
3. Home (to filter out tasks, that I can’t do with phone outside)
4. 3 tags Read, Video, Audio for saved content
5. Cal (to see fixed time events in future)

6. Smartlists:
1. WorkToday (all of the tasks from lists, which name contains “Work” and due is before tomorrow)
2. Top (p1 and due is before tomorrow, if I want to focus on MIT tasks and to reorder them manually)
3. City (tag City and due is before tomorrow)
4. Walk (tag Video or Audio and due is before tomorrow)
5. Phone (tag Phone or Read or Video or Audio and due is before tomorrow)
6. Phone-City (the same, minus Home tasks)

7. Sorting & Grouping:
1. Today and other filters: I like to group tasks by priority (so p1 is in focus, and I can switch to the bottom with routines easily). And one of the best features in RTM, that I can sort tasks by amount of times I postponed them, so when I have a lot of reccuring tasks, I can easily rotate them. This is lifeline for those who can't do the same thing every day. If I complete reccuring tasks, postpone counter resets to zero and that task go to the bottom of priority group for the next day) (so I use due-postponed-created order for sorting and priorities for grouping)
2. Inbox: last edited go to the top, so I can find last created and edited items very easily

Hope that help someone who start to use RTM, especially for irrationals and scanners 🙂