Remember The Milk

Well I have managed to stick to one of my New Years Resolutions (from last year) - I suppose there is a first time for everything!

My resolution was to get more organised. There were hundreds of things that I had promised people, decided to do or needed to be done and I was drowning in a sea of disorganisation. I would spend whole weekends doing things that weren't particularly important and then realise that I should have been doing something else.

What I needed was to get myself organised.

What I needed to do was get a jobs to do list organized, prioritise it, add diary entries for repeating items and generally sort out what I should be doing when. I found the ideal tool for this: RememberTheMilk.com. RTM (as it's known to its friends) is a brilliantly simple application for managing your todo list.

First thing I did was to go through, all the emails I had marked, notes I had written, things in my head and add them as a list of things to do. Next I added any repetitions, for instance I like to archive off my work once a month, check my backups once a month, and put the rubbish out every week. Finally I marked the tasks that were important.

Now it is simply a question of adding dates in to do things, I like the way the system takes entries like "Wednesday", "next thursday", "2 weeks" and a whole host of similar entries. Each week I shuffle round all the things to do so I hit whatever deadlines I have.

So what makes it so much better than a paper list or any of the various other options. Well I like the fact that I can have my todo list wherever I need it. I have it showing on my Netvibes page, any web browser I can get to, I can use it off-line on my laptop thanks to Google Gears, and even on my mobile all for free.

The second feature I like is that your todo list comes with it's own (hard for spammers to guess) email address. Forward an email to this and it becomes a task. So when an order comes in from my website I have a rule set up in my email client that automatically forwards the order onto my todo list as a high priority task.

I can also have shared todo lists wih my wife, so we can see which jobs we need to tell each other to do.

It's a really useful bit of software and it's free..we like that.