RememberTheMilk.com is becoming quite a popular to-do list manager. And they’ve got partners everywhere. You can now use RememberTheMilk from your Google Calendar, IM Program, and with your cellphone via SMS. You can get widgets, gadgets, and modules for it. It really is the kitchen sink of to-do lists.
The interface is very sleek. You can create a list, add tags, locate the tasks, add due-dates, and everything. It’s very appealing.
Because it is such a dandy product, I would really like to use their to-do lists. In fact, I was thinking about partnering with them. There’s only one problem though - I just can’t use it.
Now, I’m sure there are lots of other people who like it, but I don’t quite think it suits me. Despite their incredible skills in interface design and marketing I don’t think they understand what being organized is all about. (I think it suffers from the same problem as ta-da list in that respect.) It’s simply a list management tool. It isn’t ever really going to be better than a paper list. It’s still quicker to write things and find them again on a piece of paper than it is to use my cell-phone or laptop to look up anything. (Another score for diyplanner.com. 
) And to be frank, it just doesn’t fit with GTD, which still seems to be by far the best time-management process I’ve ever seen.
Another thing I learnt from RememberTheMilk is that it is very easy to confuse a user. I tried to enter a task with a due date. But when you click the “add task” button, you only get the option to enter the description of the task. You have to save it, then add a due date later. I found that really confusing. Plus there was no calendar widget to find a date with. I wanted to add a task for this weekend, but as I had no idea what date it was this coming Saturday, I tried to enter “weekend” in the due-date field (as I had been prompted to do). Unfortunately “weekend” was a word which the super-dee-duper recognition system couldn’t recognize, and I got an error message. It’s amazing how quickly I gave up.
I thought it would be nice to use an API to communicate with it, but it doesn’t have that feature yet neither. Guess they’re busy integrating with other partners instead.
So lessons learned: 1. Creating widgets helps you get eyeballs, because that indirectly forms partnerships with other companies. 2. An application should do something which a quicker system can’t do as well.
Posted in RememberTheMilk, applications, personal organization, time-management, to-do lists, tools
In you example you could have entered “Saturday”. 
