Saturday, September 09, 2006

Remember The Milk

I have been trying to get my personal life just a bit more organized, so I decided to try a web-based task manager. Based on a TechCrunch review of online to do lists, I decided give Remember The Milk a try. As a bonus, the company is also partially run by a stuffed monkey.

Remember The Milk has all of the cool web 2.0 features. You can tag your tasks and view them in a tag cloud if you just want to see tasks related to a specific tag or get a feel for which tags have the most tasks associated with them to see where you are spending your time. It also has a cool location feature where you can give each task a location and see them all together on a map. This could be great for someone planning sales calls or deciding how to most efficiently run a bunch of errands spread across the city.


You can associate notes, URLs, time estimates, due dates (single or repeating), priorities and more with each individual task. You can put all of your tasks together or spread them among several different lists to separate personal, work, and other types of tasks. Reminders can be sent to via email, IM, Skype, mobile phone, and other methods to make sure that you never forget a task.

The only thing that does not seem to work well is the RSS feeds. Netvibes will not recognize the feed at all and when I use the Firefox live bookmarks each task has a name like “2006-09-09T16:16:40Z” ... not particularly helpful.

So far, Remember The Milk seems to be a good tool for managing my tasks despite the issues with the RSS feed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, I have a code monkey too. He used to work at Ximian (he has the t-shirt). Wonder if I'll be successful too...

Tim Ingalls said...

I think the reason why the RSS feeds won't work is that you need to log in first. I'd say that is a good feature to have, not a bug. When I try to pull up the feed in Firefox, nothing loads until after I have logged in to RTM.

Maybe those other services should allow you to put in a log-in and password for your RTM account. It's worth suggesting it to them.