Thought I’d share my experiences of using online task management site, ‘Remember the Milk‘. It’s a fantastic free tool that allows you to setup to-do lists for ‘Personal, Work and Study’ tasks. Tasks can be added to lists, priorities can be set and details can be added such as deadline, related notes, links and much more. It’s like taking all those pieces of paper with ‘To-do’ written on them and putting them into a friendly, easy to use, web 2.0 format.

I’ve only been using the Personal and Work tasks as I’m not studying at the moment, but it’s already made a huge difference to how I work.

Using Remember the Milk at home

At home I am far more effective at getting things done, I’ll often say “I’ll do that later” and then forget about it - but now I can put it on my task list and set the deadline for it. I’m usually an organised person without Remember the Milk but adding it into the mix has made me super-organised.

Using Remember the Milk at work

At work is where Remember the Milk really comes into its own. In my role I get regular emails and phone calls, or words in the corridor, from colleagues asking for things to be done on the website etc. Remember the Milk allows me to jot all these tasks into one big list, prioritise them and add keywords. This means I can group tags together easily.

Setting the list of work for the day is much easier. The tasks due that day come up, ranked by priority and I get cracking. Rather than rooting through emails, bits of paper and relying on the old grey matter, I can waste no time and just get straight on with the task at hand.

The notes section has been extremely useful, allowing me to add those extra bits that people put into emails and attaching them to the task. This means I don’t have to go back through my inbox and find the relevant emails from colleagues.

I really like the tagging ability of Remember the Milk. You’re able to tag each task with relevant words, so far example a task called ‘add new environment templates to website’ might be tagged with ‘environment, templates, website’ - so if I am asked to focus on “that environment campaign we are running” I can quickly call up all the tasks relating to the environment and get on with them.

Things I’d like to see with Remember the Milk

There’s a few ways I would like to see Remember the Milk improved, some of them are for moe to explore more. I think the calender function should be easier to use. I’ve tried to use the iCalender function but it won’t work on my browser for some reason, so an easier to use calender would be fantastic to slot meetings in to.

I haven’t used the mobile phone function yet due to not having a mobile that’s powerful enough. I still have a Nokia 6630 brick - which does calls and texts which is all I need really! But I’d definitely try the integration with your mobile if you’ve got a phone with good internet browsing etc.

There’s huge potential with Remember the Milk for the sharing of tasks. I’m going to see our HR manager and show her the potential to allocate tasks, show what tasks have been achieved etc - it could make everyone more effecient and accountable. It would also help at the end of meetings where everyone says ‘Right, what’s going to happen now and who is doing what?’. The tasks could be allocated there and then into people’s workflows with deadlines set.

How have you been using it?

Are you using Remember the Milk? Are you using something else, another online task management tool? How have you been using it? Has it made you more effective and organised?

Image for this post used under creative commons from flickr user Auntie P

I spent a few hours on Monday at an NUS Services Ltd event in Birmingham about local business income generation. Well, it was supposed to be about that but the general idea seemed to be whether NUSSL could move into the student media agency area which is dominated by the likes of BAM, OnCampus, Student Media Group etc.

The overwhelming mood in the room was ‘No, you missed the boat about 5 years ago’. But, there is a huge area where NUSSL could provide something very useful to Students’ Union’s. Business solutions and in particular web based ones.

If I was in NUSSL and looking for ways to diversify I’d be considering:

- Taking an open source CRM solution and modifying it for Students’ Union’s

- Providing membership solutions in terms of clubs and societies

- Working on data solutions for Union’s to offer loyalty products such as swipe cards etc

- Offering training to Union’s on how to use social media, web technologies and how to generate income from the web

- Working on ideas for how to generate new revenue streams from mature, international, part-time and postgraduate students, because the student movement is not getting any younger

Unfortunately the event didn’t allow for much exploration of these ideas because it was dominated by lots of ‘no, no, no’ rather than ‘what about, maybe, could we’. NUSSL needs a culture change and to figure out what Students’ Union’s need in the 21st century to connect with their memberships and remains as the gatekeepers of getting messages to the student body.

squidoo logo, thanks to teamstickergiant for the image

I got pointed to something interesting today while reading about search enginge optomisation (seo), thanks to Tim Buchalka and takeoverpageone for their awesome advice about seo.

That interesting thing was Squidoo. It’s a really simple and easy way to collect everything about yourself in a simple to setup web page - and best of all it ranks really well in Google because of the ‘link juice’.

So I clicked the setup link and set up a page about myself. It took about five minutes in all (had to log in about three times which was annoying). I had to type in a brief description for my page, then write about msyelf a little bit - writing about yourself is always really difficult. You don’t want to sound like an idiot, but at the same time you don’t want to NOT saying anything about yourself. Squidoo has a little piece of text underneath the box you are writing in and it tells you if what you’ve written is good, and gives you ‘cmon’s to do more. That’s great, it’s like having a writing coach.

I added my basic modules and published my page. I was able to important the RSS feed of my latest blog entries, so this entry will be appearing shortly on my squidoo page. This is good as it gives me some link juice everytime I post an entry.

I’ve also added a text module and listed all my social media presences into it, from twitter to delicious. The plan is that when someone puts ‘edwalker’ into google, then hopefully find my presences really high up. It’s not easy as I have a very generic sounding name, but I’m determined to become a leading blogger and get myself right up there.

I’ll give it a month, and see if squidoo can make a difference.

I’ve also created a Squidoo for the organisation that I work for.

Do you Squidoo? What do you think of it? Any advice?

Stumbled across this, mindyourstreet.com - which produces crime mash-ups. This is the state of Preston, Lancashire where I live (the area I’ve just moved to has a -444 difference from 2004 to 2007, whoop!).

But this is an excellent development and use of data. Be interesting to see if the local media pick-up on this and use it to provide background for crime stories. If I was a crime correspondent I’d be lapping it up - especially as it’s a Google map so can be easily embedded anywhere.

Dave Lee asked earlier today why is it that unlike other social media and web 2.0 tools RSS enjoys relatively low appreciation. It’s used by ‘early adopters’ or geek as they are otherwise known but it hasn’t tipped into the mainstream like say YouTube, Facebook or Flickr. Dave reckons it’s because of the name and that people aren’t used to ‘feeds’ and that ’subscribing’ sounds too much like paying money.

Perhaps what RSS needs it a branding exercise to make it appeal to the masses. I suggested ‘news for you’ as a cheesey brand that a newspaper could use, but it’s along those lines - RSS provides the news that you want smack into an easily digestiable format.

Dave goes a step further and says that media outlets themselves should be creating and delivering their own RSS readers and branding these up for readers. This seems like a great idea and perhaps these RSS readers could come pre-packaged with already interesting feeds built-in. For example if I subscribed to The Guardian environment news RSS feed it might already have RSS feeds to relevant charities, NGOs, and government about environment issues. A great way of making your reader more informed about a topic.

But how to let the masses know about RSS? It needs an equivalent push to what we see in newspapers these days ‘check it online, read it online, watch it online’ is what normally accompanies any story. There needs to be advertising in both the print and online editions of media saying ‘try our own reader’, or ‘be your own reader’. The personalisation of news moves a step closer.

They could also do with embedding this great video by Common Craft explaining RSS in plain English, or produce something like it (I’d like to see The Sun’s version!): (thanks to Chris Brogan for his great post about using social media as outposts for this one)

Had a read of Chris Brogan’s excellent post about how business’ need to start sharing or they are going to be in trouble.

He’s right, everything needs to be accessible and the old barriers within business’ need to disappear or it will be the business’ themselves who disappear. The very nature of the web is to share, I’m writing this blog post now and I’m sharing something with you. Someone tags this in delicious and shares it with their network, someone else emails it to a friend. It’s easy to share online.

That’s why it’s important that organisations, even the smaller ones like I work for, get their house in order and get everyone sharing. The flow of information around an organisation is almost as important as the flow of information from the organisation. I work for an organisation, a Students’ Union, who are a very sharing and caring kind of organisation, but there has to be a putting aside of old issues and a realisation that if the organisation is to move forward then information, best practice and most importantly ideas are not discussed behind closed doors but are passed around to be added to, taken away and made better.

While people hide behind job titles, department names and bottom lines then nothing will move forward. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, if you’re not sharing with your colleagues ideas then things won’t happen. For public organisations there are definitely loads of ideas floating around about how to make things better, how to improve what’s already there - I’ve had many of them while developing the Union’s new website - but they never go anywhere other than into a pad to be thought about next year. What if that pad was online? You scribble a note, and everyone can see it an contribute. The staff intranet shouldn’t be a boring list of when the next fire inspection is, it should be a buzzing community of everyone having their say about the next big idea.

And if there’s not enough people to fulfil all the ideas, as inevitably with public organisations there aren’t, then share them with others. You’re not in competition, you’re all working towards a common goal. As Chris Brogan says:

Sharing is a new business tool. And it’s not really obvious. You have to think about the ways you can share, the ways you can’t. You have to weigh whether you’re giving away the best part, or if there’s plenty to go around (so often, the answer is B).

So there we go, how is this sharing going to happen? If the people at the top see the possibilities that social media can have the opportunities for innovation that are bubbling underneath them.

Two for today:

• Build your own mashup. Or something

Something very cool that Mozilla are working on, a mashup tool that allows you to quickly make maps and other mashups in next to no time using a simple command tool.

• Promote yourself well, or fail

Good advice from Mindy McAdams, following on from similar posts I’d been reading about becoming your own brand online. It’s important for not just journalism students, but any students in the comms/marketing/pr field to be on top of their online profiles.

Thanks to Craig McGinty for flagging this one up. Craig posted about the Manchester Evening News’ great use of Dipity to create online timelines. They created one about the congestion charge in Manchester.

Could Dipity be the answer to the problem of trying to bring an audience up to speed on a long and complex issue? A journalist relies on the archives to remind themselves of what’s happened previously and I know from when I’ve been in newsrooms a trawl through past stories was essential. Dipity is web 2.0 completely, taking loads of information in different formats and shoving it together in an easy to follow timeline. Reminds me of those textbooks we had at school of timelines about the Tudors etc?

It’s not just journalists who could be using Dipity, charities and campaigning organisations can put an issue and its background in the spotlight and show what’s happened previously. I think the Students’ Union where I work will be hoping to use it to show the top-up fees debate, which will rear its head again in 2009 when the report is started into lifting the cap. Dipity could be fantastic at taking deep, and often political, issues and putting them into an easy to follow format. How else could it be used?