Supercharge Remember The Milk: 6 Ways to Add a Task
One important thing that will ultimately hold your GTD system together and make it work for you has to be accessibility. In the first and second installment of this series, we discussed how to set up Remember The Milk to handle most of your GTD needs. We also talked about using SMS to access RTM. Here are 6 more ways to access your shiny new system.
This post is the first in a series on Super-Charging Remember The Milk including:
- Smart Lists and Tags
- Remember The Milk/GTD Overview
- Six Ways to Add a Task (this post)
1. Email
When you signed up for Remember The Milk, you received a special unique email address. You can find this address in your confirmation email or on the RTM site in Settings->Info. Just shoot RTM an email at the address provided with your new task as the subject. The body can be empty, or you can use any of the following (quoted from the RTM site):
Priority: 1 or P: 1
Due: Monday at 9am or D: Monday at 9am
Repeat: Every Week or R: Every Week
Estimate: 2 hours or E: 2 hours
Tags: report coffee or S: report coffee
Location: Home or O: Home
URL: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ or U: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/
By default, your task will appear in your Inbox. If you want the task to appear in a different list, you can do so with the following:
List: Work or L: Work
Optionally, if you’re unable to specify the subject of your email, you can use the following to specify the task name:
Task: Weekly work meeting or T: Weekly work meeting
Notes can be included at the bottom of the email, but need to be separated with ‘—’ (three hyphens).
If your email automatically contains a signature or disclaimer that you’d like to prevent being converted into a note, you can include ‘-end-’ on a line by itself, and everything after this line will be ignored.
2. Instant Messenger
- Add one of these to your buddy list:
| AIM | IMified |
| MSN | imified@imified.com |
| Google Talk | imified@imified.com |
| Jabber | imified@imified.com |
- Send it any random message and it will create an account for you and send you back a menu
- Choose the menu option for My Accounts (should be number 4) and follow the link you receive
- Add the Remember The Milk widget and send ‘M’ to your IMified buddy
- You should see a new option for your newly added RTM widget. Have fun
3. Desktop Launcher
This happens to be my favorite because it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, I can always hit a key combo and immediately add something to RTM. Doing things this way also helps you stay focused because you don’t have to really think about it.
I use a launcher called…well, Launchy. It’s fast and flexible. This particular solution requires that you have RTM set up with Twitter. Go back here if you missed it. Here is how you make Launchy work with Remember The Milk:
- Download and install Launchy
- Download and install Curl
- Download this ZIP and extract it to C:\Program Files\Launchy\Utilities
- Edit the file “rtm.bat” and put in your Twitter username and password
Are you on a MAC?
There is a Dashboard widget and a QuickSilver Plugin
Are you on Linux?
Check out this Deskbar Applet.
4. Quick Add
Who doesn’t love bookmarklets? Check out This FAQ for details on setting up your browser. You can watch this video for a demo of how it works.
5. Gmail Plugin
Do you live in Gmail? Go get the Gmail Plugin and integrate it with Remember The Milk.
6. Google Calendar
Put your tasks right on your calendar with This Plugin. Once you add it, just click one of the blue check marks to see what you should be doing.
Conclusion
I use a combination of these at any given time. Primarily, I stick with 3, 5 and 6. Also, there are way more than 6 methods for accessing Remember The Milk. You can find out more information on their website.
Thought I’d let you know of something I cooked up. I wrote a batch file based on your Twitter+cURL scripts that stores failed operations and sends them later. I’m a command line user, so I didn’t test it with Launchy, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
Thanks for the initial tip!
PS: Sorry that my blog post is in spanish. Quick instructions:
To send a twit:
- twit This is a test message.
To interface with RTM, of course:
- twit d rtm wash car tomorrow at 11:30
To resend failed twits:
- twit /retwit
Nosgoroths last blog post..Anunciado anime de Haruhi-chan y Churuya-san
Fully standalone executable for the commandline. I guess it will work properly with Launchy:
Blog post: http://uguu.es/blog/2008/08/24/mas-twitter-desde-commandline-y-mas-pro-mode-on/
Direct link: http://www.uguu-web.com/Data/twt/twt.exe
http://jott.com/jott/remember-the-milk-jott-link.html
Always a pleasure to read this kind of post
A couple other options:
iGoogle gadget – http://tinyurl.com/3an874
In some ways, I like the add task interface better on the gadget
RTM Tool for Windows – http://tinyurl.com/5ntukr
Freeware. From the author: “uses the Remember The Milk API but is not endorsed or certified by Remember The Milk.”
Thanks for the additions, Jim
quick note for launchy, you can simply set up the plugin weby(buildt in i belive), with the name RTM, the URL http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/ext/add... and the query string d=&t=%s
brings you to a page with the string as the title of the new task.
quick note for launchy, you can simply set up the plugin weby(buildt in i belive), with the name RTM, the URL http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/ext/add... and the query string d=&t=%s
brings you to a page with the string as the title of the new task.
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