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Clearing clutter from field-checking Smart Lists

spamboy says:
I've seen other people use variations of Smart Lists to confirm tasks are completely filled in. I wanted to see what others were doing to clear clutter from their Smart Lists.

Here are my four "check" lists:

1) due:never
2) isLocated:false
3) istagged:false
4) NOT timeEstimate:"> 0"

For #1 and #3, it's easy to get things off these Smart Lists: add a due date or add a tag. Some Tasks never have a Due Date, and I am looking for a way to filter these out of my Smart List in a more-creative fashion than just adding something like the tag "neverdue"

For #2, I created a location called "None" and add that to Tasks which will never be location-specific. That way, I can get them to not clutter my Smart List. The coordinates I keyed when creating the Location was "4.815N 162.342 W" -- i.e. the numbers from Lost. :)

For #4, I modified my Smart List by adding:

AND NOT timeEstimate:"0 minutes"

Then I can assign an estimate of "0 minutes" to Tasks which I cannot estimate until they have occurred (usually my repeating annual tasks) or serve as reminder tasks on the day they're due. Therefore, my Smart List ends up looking like:

NOT timeEstimate:"> 0" AND NOT timeEstimate:"0 minutes"
Posted at 7:03pm on June 5, 2009
andrewski (Remember The Milk) says:
That sounds pretty good! I've recently been revising my method (again) and part of that is to create some check lists.

One of my problems is that I avoid due dates in general (as per GTD) but this causes an indistinction between tasks that are due "anytime" and those I can't (or don't want to) do yet (so my lists get overly long and I often don't get to my "anytime" tasks). So I've been adding a "someday" tag to those latter ones and filtering them out of my Smart Lists.

So maybe your #1 check list could be something like due:never NOT tag:someday? At least for me, that would be effective (and will be, now that I'm going to adopt it). Thanks for the idea. :)
Posted 14 years ago
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