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How to use Smart Groups

Smart Groups are a quick and easy way to group together tasks that have the same tag. Just enter the name of your group, and all the tags that you would like grouped together and all your tasks with these tags are automatically listed in your smart group!

The first step to creating a Smart Group is to click the “Add/Edit Smart Groups” button under the heading “Smart Groups” in the left column. The following screen should pop up for you:

Add Smart Group

We wanted to make Smart Groups as quick and easy to use as the rest of the app. To create a new Smart Group, all you have to do is enter the name of the Smart Group, and what tags are going to be included in this Smart Group.

Now, this is the tricky part (well not really tricky but different).  Any tasks with the tags that you entered in the previous screen will show up in your Smart Group no matter where they are.  All you have to do to add tasks to the Smart Group is add a task ANYWHERE in Get It Done and include at least one of the tags you’ve listed above when creating the Smart Group.  The task will automatically appear in your Smart Group.  For example, say I created a project called “School” and I listed “Biology” in the tag list.  If I go to my “‘Next” folder and add a task called “Read chapter 5″ and tag it with the “Biology” tag, the task will show up in my “Next” folder and also in my “School” project folder.  You can include as many tags as you want in each Smart Group.

As you can see in the following screen shot, you can very quickly see all your tasks with ‘Smart Groups’, no matter if they are in your ‘Inbox’, ‘Today’, ‘Next’, or even if they are scheduled for review at a later date — they will still show up here:

Smart Groups

And, of course, you can still drag and drop your tasks to reorder or to put them into a different folder, just like in your other views. You can also double click to edit the task or put your mouse over the note icon to see the note.

A Smart Group was our original attempt at creating Projects.  Due to your valuable feedback, we’ve since modified the way Projects work.  Smart Groups show all tasks with a specific tag, no matter what Area they belong in.  They simply look at ALL tasks in your account and display the ones with the assigned tags.  A task can show up in more than one Smart Group.

It might take a little getting used to, but we find Smart Groups saves us a lot of time. Time we can spend on actually “Getting Things Done”!

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