I sell services involving a long 1 year selling cycle. Over the months towards closing an account, I'm working to achieve small incremental advances in penetrating the account and reaching/convincing a committee of influencers & a couple of decision makers. I could keep creating new tasks (e.g. call Joe or get Martha to agree to meeting) to give me lots of tasks to "complete".

But I gave up on getting satisfaction from clicking "completed" a lot of small tasks (subtasks really) in favor of better organizing all my account notes. So I choose to use the same main task, which in effect means "win or lose account Y", and I add lots of notes as I complete incremental subtasks along the way (call joe, get Martha to agree to meeting, get legal into contract discussions). After I make a little progress and record a note, I then rename the task to the next subtask I need to complete and push out the date of the overall task due date to when that next subtask should be done.

I do use tags to always keep the account name visible next to the task. Having 1 task for each prospective account is much easier to manage than a dozen for each.

The result is that I have all my notes for one account under one task, and I no longer need to search for through a gazillion completed tasks to figure out where I left off with any account. I simply look at my chronological notes to track progress. Also, I no longer need to worry about pushing 10 subtasks out because I couldn't yet complete a prerequisite task that got delayed. I spend a lot less time reprioritizing tasks and much more time getting subtasks done!

By the way, by figuring this out, I was able to leave Outlook in the dust and complete a migration to google for mail, contacts and calendar (google tasks are crude compared to RTM). Go Bob!

Hope it helps.