In my job I conduct environmental reviews for our facilities. Each review consists of about 30 tasks (plan travel, create schedule, coordinate with consultants, pre-visit conference call, follow-up items, etc.) and I conduct 8 per year. These tasks follow a pretty tight timeline based on the date of the actual site visit (e.g. travel must be planned 35 days before site visit) or the pre-visit conference call (e.g. send agenda 7 days before call). And throughout the year these deadlines overlap greatly (task 27 of one site's review might be due at the same time as task 3 of another). It can quickly become a big, unmanageable mess of missed deadlines.

Enter the Excel-RTM Import combo. I create a template in Excel which lists:
The variables:
- the site visit date
- conference call date
- site name
The fixed details:
- each action item
- which date they are timed from (visit or call)
- what their time offset is (e.g. site visit -30 days)
- the time estimate for each task

I then use Excel formulae to calculate the due dates and assemble a SmartList Import string. For example:
"Plan Travel" which is based on "Site Visit" with an offset of "-35 days" and time estimate of "60 minutes" automatically generates:
"Plan travel for HQ ^11/08/10 =60 min"

Now, to create my "conveyor belt" of action items, I just fill in three variables (site name, visit date, call date) and 30 tasks are instantly generated, ready to be emailed to my RTM Import email address. The only drawback is that my all of my e-mail programs create a line return after 72 characters, so I have to keep the SmartList Import string less than 72 in length. And there is a limit to the number of items that the Import address can take at one time (50?) so I just do one set at a time.

Now, I can keep up with multiple overlapping sets of tasks and generate my tasks in about 15 minutes. I also know that I'm very consistent on the timing from review to review.

Has anyone else done this? Any suggestions or improvements?