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

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?

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