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This may not be news to anyone else, but I just did an experiment with e-mailing a task list to RTM for a recurring project to see if I could use the new Smart Add syntax to automatically populate the priority, date, tags and other fields. It worked like a charm. I now create task lists for recurring projects (e.g., quarterly patch updates) in Microsoft Word that include all the required task fields. Whenever the time comes to repeat the project, I just cut and paste from Word into an e-mail using my RTM import e-mail address and the name of the list I want it to go to as the subject and I'm good to go!
Not only does this make it easy to set up my task list each time I need to complete the recurring project; it forces me to think through the process carefully. I’m coming up with steps that I might have easily missed if I hadn’t thought it through. This is a great way to document a recurring process.
The only problem I’m running into at the moment is that certain e-mail systems/clients automatically word wrap at 72 characters and this causes RTM to treat each line of a long task as separate tasks. I found a website for submitting task lists so that this doesn’t happen, but am going to implement my own PHP form for security reasons. For those of you who are interested the submission site I found is here:
http://www.filmnut.org/html-php/blogger_archives/2009/01/batch-submit-tasks-to-remember-milk-web_21.php
Below is a very simplified list to show what a recurring project list might look like in the body of your e-mail:
First task Monday #na #karen !1 @work
Second task Tuesday #na !3 @work
Third task next Friday #na !2 @home
Here’s RTM’s instructions on how to e-mail a list, although they haven’t updated it to use the Smart Add features:
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/answers/sending/importemail.rtm
The Smart Add syntax is here:
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/smartadd/
Posted at 5:30pm on September 29, 2009
says:I know a number of people on these boards do this, but no one has written it up so cleanly. I nominate this for a RTM blog post and the free Pro membership. This is just the sort of tutorial that new RTM user's can use.
The use of weekdays to generate dates is as close to relative dates as RTM gets; it's very clever.
Posted at 4:38am on September 30, 2009
says:Smart move, clever of you to test this!
It could also be used as a template to populate a list with several subtasks, each with it's own tags, location, duration and due date. Earlier e-mail methods left you with loads of task with no meta information what-so-ever, this is much better!
Posted at 8:01am on September 30, 2009
nice writeup!
Posted at 10:21pm on October 4, 2009
says:I nominate this as tip of the week. It gives users a way to set up templates with all the tasks, tags, due dates etc they need.
If you add Excel to the mix you could have Excel calculate all the dates for the project and then copy the dated tasks to your e-mail program and send all to RTM.
Posted at 7:41am on October 5, 2009
I hadn't thought of using Excel to calculate the dates. That's an excellent idea. I'll have to give that a shot!
Posted at 1:01pm on October 5, 2009
If you experience the problem of the word wrap in MS Outlook just go to:
Tools -> Options -> Mail Format -> Internet Format...
And change the value in the box "Automatically wrap text at" to something like '130'.
And your problem should be gone.
Posted at 4:05pm on October 5, 2009
Thanks for the suggestion. I previously tried setting word wrap in Outlook because that's what other posts had suggested, but it didn't do any good. I guess it must have more to do with the mail server than the client. I've tried using my work and Gmail accounts with the same results.
Posted at 1:13pm on October 6, 2009
