Hack: Remove double checkboxes

I move my checkbox items around a lot into different categories or headers – i.e. from “This Week” to “MITs” (most important tasks), from “Sometime this Week” to “Defer to Next Week” or whatever the case may be:

#### This Week
- [ ] non-emergent task 1
- [ ] non-emergent task 2
#### MITs
- [ ] gotta get done today

The problem is I usually create a space for something I’m about to move by hitting ENTER at the end of an existing checkbox item, and my settings are such that the next line automatically creates a new checkbox. This is what I want to happen. But when I’m moving an existing task item into this new space, I end up with double checkboxes:

#### This Week
- [ ] non-emergent task 1
#### MITs
- [ ] gotta get done today
- [ ] - [ ]  copied/pasted task 2 from above

Yes, you can mouse around and be careful to grab the old line from the exact left side of the text column and select everything including the old checkbox code. Or you can hit backspace/delete a bunch of times. I prefer to use single hotkeys for repetitive tasks as much as possible. So I use Keyboard Maestro (or you can use whatever app you have that lets you pre-write multiple keystrokes) and let it do all of it for you in one hotkey.

Maybe there’s something obvious I’m missing, or there’s a more elegant solution, but writing macros like this to save keystrokes is something that never gets old to me. It’s almost like shift-tab for out-denting a line, but for me it’s metakey-R to remove double checkboxes.

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[Ctr]+[L], the shortcut to toggle bullet lists removes the first checkbox.