What's so hard about remembering the milk?

• Author: Vitartas, Kristen
• Position: Technology

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"You're so young; you shouldn't be so forgetful all the time." I often get teased because I make lists. The truth is I make lists not only to remember things, but to keep myself organized. With the rigors of everyday life bearing down on working professionals, how can we possibly remember everything? Well, we can't and now there's help available so we don't have to.

A free online task management site called "Remember the Milk (RTM)" (www.rememberthemilk.com) is available to manage your tasks in the form of lists so you will "never forget the milk" or anything else again.

Here's just a sample of what you can do with RTM.

MANAGE TASKS EFFORTLESSLY

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Ever have an idea pop into your head or suddenly remember something as you're driving, only to have it disappear from your thoughts before you can write it down? It's okay--it happens to the best of us (at least that's what I'm telling myself). With RTM you don't have that problem. You can just fire off an e-mail or text message from your phone and RTM will add it to your list.

RECEIVE TEXT, E-MAIL AND INSTANT MESSAGE REMINDERS

Set up reminders for your tasks to be sent to you via the interface of your choice. Choose from e-mail, text or instant messenger services such as AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Skype or Yahoo. You can't get any more convenient than that.

ORGANIZE WITH LISTS AND TAGS

RTM also offers "task clouds" to help find and organize information. The more a tag appears throughout your lists, the larger the font in which the tag is displayed. Your task cloud appears on each list as a bubble or cloud containing your preset tags, as well as each list that was created. The longer lists also appear different from shorter lists, helping you easily differentiate.

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Task clouds also help me easily spot the subjects of any blog I'm reading, or in this case, the contents of my lists and tasks. As tasks are entered in lists, you can easily categorize the entries by tagging the contents of your task.

It is also easy to distinguish between lists and tags in the cloud, as your lists will be displayed in gray and your tags will be shown in blue.

Another cool aspect of the task cloud: the higher the priority or the closer the due date, the larger the words appear, making sure that you can't miss what matters most.

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