Using Remember the Milk for GTD (Getting Things Done)

Using Remember the Milk for GTD (Getting Things Done) - Part 1

January 13th, 2009 by John

Truth be told, I’m a productivity junkie, or should I say, productivity tool junkie. For past many years, I’ve been playing around with hidden personal BBS, email, tons of online/offline todo-managing tools, offline planners like Franklin Planner, Moleskine… you know the drill. Recently, Things came in quite handy for a few weeks, but lack of native mobile me syncing was a serious problem for people using multiple Macs like me.

My goal was to minimize the overhead of managing my tasks and having a trusted system for organizing todos. Then I gave remember the milk (RTM) a shot.

rmilk_1

Close friends have been recommending this site for months, if not for years, but I didn’t really care to try it out because it was another web-based todo tool and I’ve tried so many in the past that I was simply too tired of poor performance and usability. Contrary to my assumption, remember the milk had a clean interface, rich keyboard shortcuts, light-weight performance, etc. I also stumbled across numerous articles implementing Getting Things Done (GTD) with remember the milk, so I decided to organize a tutorial of my own to share with the world.

Below is another, half-baked, yet simple way to implement GTD with remember the milk. (kudos to dodobing for wonderful tutorial. My work is based on dodobing’s with some added salt)

1. Getting around remember the milk

rmilk_2

Once you’ve signed up, you should click on Tasks on the top navigation bar, or Continue to Tasks on the right sidebar, which will take you to a screen that looks like the one below:

rmilk_3

You will see five tabs labeled Inbox, Personal, Study, Work, and Sent (these are default lists) followed by list of tasks underneath. Orange, dark blue, bright blue colors on the left side of the task list show priorities, and on the right side of the list shows additional information (like due dates and notes). Their Tour page shows the summary of features on RTM.

Here are some noticeable services on RTM that you might want to know:

You can use RTM with Gmail by enabling Gmail Labs (read the instructions)
If you are using Google Gears, you can use RTM in offline mode which can be quite useful for people on-the-go with their laptops.
Tasks can be synced with Google Calendar
You can use it with twitter as well
There is an iPhone/iPod Touch app that you can use (it’s not completely free, unless you are using the $25/year Pro account)
You can tag your tasks, delegate and share tasks with other people

2. What you need to know before diving into GTD with RTM

First and foremost, you need to try Smart List. I have to admit, I hate having to learn new things when I come across a new web service, but smart list was quite easy to learn and rather, enlightening.

rmilk_tabs

Gray-colored tabs are general lists. They are just plain tabs. You can add or remove general lists at your will. Blue-colored ones are called smart lists. These tabs show tasks that match certain conditions (e.g. certain tags, due dates, and alike). (FYI: white-colored tab is the currently selected tab)

For example, you might want to create a list of things that are due within this week. You can make one using smart list, and the list gets automatically updated according to the conditions you assign.

Making smart list is really simple. For starters, let’s add some tasks that come across your mind. Then follow the next steps.

First, search something that you want to make as a condition for your smart list. Search form is at the top of the right sidebar that looks something like below. You can simply search for something by the task name, but you can also create complex search conditions using search options. Multiple search conditions can be assigned as well.
Do the search. Tasks may or may not show depending on the conditions you’ve assigned. It’s okay to not have any task that satisfies the conditions you’ve set for your smart list. Below is an example snapshot of the result that shows on your right sidebar when searched with tag:@work. You can see the summary of the search result.
By clicking on the Save tab, you can create a smart list. You need to fill in the name for your smart list. Let’s save it as @Work.
That’s it! You should see a blue-colored tab labeled @Work on your list now. Whenever you click on @Work tab, you should see the list of tasks with @work tag.

For further information, RTM’s website offers a video tutorial of using tags and smart lists as well.

So, that was smart lists. Next time, we’ll go straight to implementing GTD using RTM.

Tags: getting things done, GTD, guide, productivity tools, remember the milk, RTM, tutorial

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 2:44 am and is filed under Our Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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