Judging by our desk, you’d never guess that we try to be highly organized. And we’ve tried everything, from David Allen’s nerd-famous Getting Things Done (GTD) dogma, to complex Mac apps, endless paper notebooks, and iCal’s built in to-do features. We have yet to find the perfect system for managing not only our work tasks, but also all the other stuff we have to do in the course of our daily life. But Remember The Milk, a Web service also accessible via iPhone, is helping us become more organized than ever.
Signing up for a Remember The Milk account is free. From there, you can use RTM’s Web interface to create multiple lists to organize all of your to-dos. RTM supports all sorts of metadata for individual to-do items, including due dates, repeat schedules, time estimates, text notes, and tags (a favorite among GTD-ers). RTM also offers complex searches that can be saved as Smart Lists, similar to iTunes’ Smart Playlist feature.
Don't forget the milk...or anything else that you need to do.
Advanced users will appreciate the various ways you can interact with Remember The Milk. You can submit tasks by email, share tasks with other RTM users, create SMS and email reminders, and display your RTM tasks in iCal or another calendar program. Paid Pro accounts also give you access to an RTM app for iPhones, as well as an optimized iPhone web interface. Robust APIs mean that you can access and manipulate your tasks with a variety of software and devices--the service even supports 3rd-party iPhone apps.
Remember The Milk is easy enough for newbies to pick up, but it supports a deep feature set that will satisfy ninja-level task managers as well. But nothing is ever perfect. RTM only offers a fairly flat structure of individual Tasks that belong to a List, so there’s no ability to nest tasks and create multistep projects. Complex tasks with due dates and tags, for example, require entering data into multiple fields. We’d vastly prefer a smart text-entry field that could parse data, so that we wouldn’t have to enter task names and due dates in different spots. And there’s no way to set email/text reminders for tasks individually.
Web interface is free. Powerful searching allows you to focus on only certain tasks. View tasks using iCal, Google Calendar, or other software. iPhone app supports push notifications.
No nested tasks. Missing fine-grained control over reminders. Task entry could benefit from some automatic data parsing.
