Remember the milk
This time last year I read most of the GTD book and overhauled my existing todo management system (notes in diaries, tasks in outlook, email TODOs etc). After that and up until the beginning of the year I relied on monkeyGTD to help me keep track of what my team and I needed to do. I used it locally, on my desktop and kept backups etc and whilst it worked pretty well for me, it started to get pretty unwieldy due to storing all the tasks within the page itself, not to mention that it was only useful at work and didn't help me when I was at home (there is a password protected online version of monkeyGTD I could have used which would have overcome this issue) so I was still emailing TODO items to my work email address. So, not perfect.
Several months later, with a new (non management) job and tasks building up I decided it was time to move to a new tool. I knew that Paul was a devotee of Remember the Milk (rtm) and so thought I'd give it a try.First impressions were good, with an easy to use interface allowing me to create as many or as few lists as I needed, with priorities, dates, repeating tasks etc and a handy getting started guide. I discovered an iGoogle gadget which allows an easy method of maintaining a task list. Being an iGoogle fan (there's a blog post coming sometime soon about why this is) this works well for me as the page is open in my browser window quite a lot of the time.Not long after I started using rtm, they announced twitter integration and being a twitter fan I was totally sold. By linking up twitter to my rtm account, I can:-
- add tasks to rtm by sending direct messages (d rtm). These get sent to my rtm inbox list. Parsing takes place so if I send a task "Buy milk today @7pm" it'll get added to rtm with an appropriate date and time reminder
- set up my reminder service in rtm to direct message me with tasks due - either daily reminders or the time based reminders
Having got my twitter direct messages going straight to my mobile phone, I get timely reminders sent to me directly. A fantastic combination of technologies.