I’m an organizationally challenged person. I give it my best shot, but no matter what I try, I always fall short. I get tired of carrying planner books around, lists are lost or crumpled in the bottom of my purse, and well…you get the idea. But I’m an “out of sight – out of mind” kinda gal, so I need to see the things I need to do in order to get them done.
I do like lists, however, because of that great feeling you get when you cross items off of it, knowing that you’ve accomplished so much. But I needed a system where the lists were in one place, all the time, and I didn’t have to (necessarily) carry them around with me.
Enter Remember the Milk. RTM’s been around for awhile, despite the Beta tag attached to their logo. It’s a web application for making to-do lists. The beauty of RTM is in its simplicity. You make a list (or a whole bunch of lists) and put things to do on it. You can prioritize your items, move them between lists, copy them for other lists, and share your lists with other people. And that’s about it. A PRO account (for a very reasonable $25 per year) doesn’t get you a whole heck of a lot more; the major feature of PRO accounts is the ability to use RTM on your iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile smartphones
I’ve had an account with RTM for awhile, but never really used it much. For one thing, most web applications are blocked by my work computer (such as Google Docs, Zoho, Zenbe, etc.), so I hate to start using something only to see it go away as soon as I start relying on the stuff there. I’m really into “working in the cloud” – keeping my data online somewhere – so that I can access it from almost any computer I work at (except when blocked by internet filters). So RTM seemed like a good choice to start making lists with.
RTM doesn’t even have ads all over it! I don’t know if that will change when it comes out of beta, but I hope not. The clean, easy-to-use interface took me about five minutes to figure out. I now have sixteen new lists. Why so many, you ask?
I like daily lists, so I made seven labeled “Daily – 1>Sunday, Monday, Tues, etc.” so I can jot down things to be done on a specific day of my week. There’s a list called Personal, one for Shopping, and even one where I list all the uncompleted knitting and crocheting projects I want to get finished. (Oh wait, I just remembered a new item for my list…hang on one while I go write it down. Ok, back.)
I open up RTM in the morning and leave it in my browser window all day. To add a new task, Iike I just did, I simply click the list I want to add it to, either use the ADD TASK link (or the keyboard shortcut is a simple “T” keystroke) and write my task. I can add all sorts of information to the task, like a due date, a URL associated with the task, text notes, tags, locations, repeats, and more. I haven’t gotten sophisticated enough with my lists to use many of those features, but they’re there for the really organized person.
After getting all my lists together, I printed off today’s list on a couple of index cards to carry around. As I thought of a couple of more items to do today, I wrote them on the list, then added them to RTM when I logged in for the day. Sweet!
We’ll see how well this works out as I change offices at least twice in the next few weeks, will RTM help me stay on-track and organized?
What do you do to keep up with all the things that need to be done? Super-amazing memory? Sticky notes on the fridge? A daily planner stuffed to the brim?
