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My work around for no start date field

davidscottweaver says:
Hey gang, the one thing I was really missing coming from Toodledo was a start date field. I really mostly used it for bills and gifts though, so I thought with all the power of the search operators something surely could be done. Here's what I came up with. I decided to have a bills tag and a gifts tag, and put in the smartlist to show bills 2 weeks ahead and gifts 3 weeks out (just my personal lead time preferences). Here's the code behind my "@Home" list:

(tag:home OR tag:ipod OR tag:computer OR tag:calls) AND (due:Today OR due:Never) OR (tag:bills AND dueWithin:"2 weeks of today") OR (tag:gifts AND dueWithin:"3 weeks of today")

Now, whenever I tag something as a bill or gift, I get 2 or 3 weeks of lead time automatically, respectively. To me this is the the cleanest way of getting a heads up. Now I can have the Birthday tasks due on the actual Birthday and the bill dates due on the actual bill due date. Here's something else, I didn't want my Christmas list showing up 25 items all at once 3 weeks before the 25th, so I don't tags those "gifts". I just have a task called "Finish Christmas shopping" tagged as gifts and then all the people I need to shop for is in a list called "Xmas" that I just look at manually. So the gifts tag is for all other gifts (birthday, Mothers day, anniversaries, etc.)

Hope this helps someone as much as it does me!

P.S. I love RTM!!!
Posted at 2:01pm on November 18, 2008
ranbarton Power Poster says:
This is very clever, to have agreed upon categories of teaks defined by tags and then to use that for the lead time. As clever as Rajjan's method is, it's always been too much work for me, but this looks doable to me.

Thanks for posting.
Posted 15 years ago
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