Sean’s Blog

I keep finding more useful ways to use Remember The Milk.  My booklist, my wedding planning, my bills.  It is just a generally great tool.  Last week though, when I went on vacation I ran across a really cool feature that I’ve never used.  Tags.

I had a whole bunch of tasks that that I wanted to get accomplished during my week off.  The problem I had was they were spread across a bunch of lists.  Some were things I needed to do for the house, some were things I needed to do for the wedding, some were things I wanted to do for my blog.  I didn’t want to make duplicate action items in a new list, but I wanted one place to be able to view them all.

So I added a tag.  That way, I could just click on that tag and it would pull all the items I had tagged to a list and let me work off that.  I know this is a pretty obvious feature, but I was really impressed with how well it worked.  Generally, the only way I’ll learn a new feature is to actually have some sort of use case like this.

For a while now I’ve been using Remeber The Milk and while it is useful, the reason I’ve really come to love it is for how it lets me keep track of books.  I read a lot and, like most of you, I am always finding or hearing about books I would like to read.  The problem is that I can never remember them, let alone while I am browsing at the library or bookstore with eight thousand other books staring at me.

Enter Remember the Milk.  Whenever I run across a book that I might be interested in reading, I add it to the list.  Most of the time, I’ll  check  to see if it’s  available at my local library as well.

When I go to the library, I’ll check out some books from the list.  If I see anything that catches my eye browsing, I’ll add it to the list.  This is where the mobile feature of being able to use it on my Blackberry really shines.

When I get home, I’ll add a personal task to return the books I checked out due by the date and mark the books in the list as completed.  This system should really work with any task manager, but RTM just makes it really easy for me.

I almost feel like I’ve been cheating for the past week. After a long time pimping MonkeyGTD, I’ve switched to Remember The Milk. I don’t think I am going to be switching back anytime soon either. After I wrote the post last week about staying organized away from the computer I started to look into applications that would work on my Blackberry.

Remember The Milk got some serious love on Lifehacker’s Best GTD applications and I though I would give it a try. I was pretty much immediately blown away. RTM had everything I was looking for and more.

First off, it is web based and free (for the non-pro version). It easily manages my tasks and has a mobile interface (this was the killer for MonkeyGTD in my book). It integrates with Google calendar and can send me messages when tasks are due.

One of my killer apps was to be able to jot down books I wanted to read and then have access to that list at the library. I simply created a list called Books, and started keeping track of books I wanted to read whenever I came across them. Then when I made a trip to the library, i just logged on top the mobile interface, pulled up my book list and grabbed several of them. I added a couple books on the fly at the library that I didn’t want to take out yet, but wanted to read in the future.

When I got home, I put in a task to return the library books due on the books due dates.

The Pro version has tools that will actually sync with the native Blackberry applications, but right now I don’t need that level of integration.

MonkeyGTD is a great tool, but I am going to be sticking with Remember The Milk. Give it a try. It rocks my geeky world.