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Creating naming of lists to order them the way you want them

(closed account) says:
I've seen posts in these forums requesting a feature to be able to order your lists other than in the default alphabetic order. I agree, this would be a nice feature. To some degree, you can control the order of your tabs by being creative with naming them. I've named mine to group them more to my liking than the straight alphabetic would be.

E.g., I wanted all of my Projects grouped together and not scattered about in my other Smart lists. Each project has a tag that starts with "pr", then the Project abbreviation (3 alpha characters that represent the name, like CVS is the abbreviation for Contact-Visit Spreadsheet. Then comes the subproject name, like "NewCat" for "New Category", a subproject of CVS. So it's tag is "prcvsnewcat". The list name for that Project is "zprCVSNewCat". If I named the lists the same as the tags, starting with "pr", they'd be together, but in the middle of my Smart lists. Prefacing the tag name with the z puts all projects near the end of my Smart lists.

The reasons the project tabs are not at the end of the list is that my list "~Check", which is a list I created, based on another tip I found in these forums, to find untagged, unprioritized tasks. I wanted it at the end of the list, again separate from my regular Smartlists, So I prepended it with the tilde, which in ASCII is after the alphabet.

To the left of the "~Check" list is my "zzz" list., which is also based on one of the tips I found in these forums to simulate task Start Dates. So it falls between my projects, starting with a single z, and my "~Check" list.

So my lists appear in the following order:
1) Standard Lists, starting with "Inbox" and including the ones I've created. I've fiddled with the names of those to get them in the order I want just by being a little creative with their names.
2) Smartlists, starting with my "All Tasks" list, a good place to start.
3) Project lists, all starting with "z" to force them to the right of the other Smartlists.
5) My "zzz" list,, to the right of my other Smartlists
6) "~Check", my checklist to make sure I don't misplace any tasks, the tilde forcing it to the end of my lists.

I could also use other ASCII characters to put other series of lists in front of my other Smart lists. Like an exclamation point. I haven't found a need for that yet, but it's there if the need arises. If you want a complete list of ASCII characters, the list that RTM uses to order the regular lists and the smartlists (and the tags), just Google for "ASCII character map". Use this list to gain better control of your Lists order.

Hope this helps.
Posted at 7:21pm on September 10, 2009
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