Ash Blue Web Design

Task Management and Remember The Milk

Looking around the freelance and small business community you’ll start to notice many people use an online program called Remember The Milk. Due to this application’s  popularity you’d expect to see lots of tips and information on using it. But other than some brief articles from the creators of the program you won’t find much. Here I’ve put together a list of task management tips and ways you can use Remember The Milk to make your life easier.

Organizing your time

Good task management doesn’t start with a program, you have to start with yourself. So often we think technology is going to solve our time management problems, but usually it ends up making them worse (watch Iron Man if you don’t believe me). Here we’re going to focus on time management skills to avoid pitfalls people make from relying solely on technology for task management.

Brainstorm and write everything down

When figuring out what you need to do, don’t assume that you will remember everything that needs to be done. Too often I’ve thought I’d remember an extremely important task, but would realize at 10pm that I missed an appointment at 4pm. Avoid this by writing everything down you can think of. You can always go through and take out useless items later. This way you have room in your head to generate new ideas, tasks, and focus on things more important than your schedule.

Break tasks into smaller pieces

Sometimes I’ll write down tasks like “Pay bills” and inevitably miss related tasks I need to perform. Tasks needs to be specific, so pay bills can be broken down into electric, credit cards, student loans, gas, ect. Not breaking your tasks down oversimplifies things, leading to unrealistic expectations of what you can do for a daily schedule. If your to do list items are constantly getting pushed back, you’re probably doing this and don’t even realize it.

Spread out your tasks

Don’t forget to spread out the bits and pieces of a large task across multiple dates. For instance, lets say I want to read a book called Head First: PHP & MySQL. I could write down “Read Head First: PHP & MySQL” but that really wouldn’t do me any good. I would need to break the book into 13 chapters and spread them across multiple dates.

Prioritize and stay focused

Its so easy to get lazy, burned out, or side tracked when you have a daunting to do list in front of you. Try to seclude yourself when working to minimize conflicts of interest. This is especially important when you know that at the drop of a dime you would abandon ship for something other than work. I personally close my room’s door, shut off my cell phone, close out of Facebook, and anything else that could be distracting when I really need to focus.

You need to be careful that you take care of the important tasks first. When faced with a stressful task I’ll do all of the little less important things until I feel like doing it. Problem is, sometimes I never feel like doing it. Put the difficult tasks at the top of lists or somewhere you can always see them.

Making Remember The Milk your own personal secretary

Remember The Milk is one of the most powerful and simplified task management programs out there. Most of the program is simple and easy to use, but its packed with some powerful features that will make your life easier.

Personalized lists

One of the most important features Remember The Milk offers is the ability to create custom lists. This is great because you can separate work from personal tasks. To add a custom list click on Settings -> Lists. I’ve edited my lists to have a section for “Work” and “Personal” so I can focus on web design during my work hours and not inadvertently get sidetracked with personal tasks.

Weekly planner view

More than one occasion I’ve somehow managed to schedule twenty plus tasks in one day and leave the next three empty. You can avoid stressing yourself out to death by checking the weekly planner view by clicking on the “Remember The Milk logo” and then clicking “Weekly Planner.” This gives you a simple layout of what the week is going to look like and plan out how to spread out your schedule.

Offline mode

Google Gears has made it possible to access GMail, Google Calendar, and many other applications when no internet connection is present. Remember The Milk offers the same offline technology so you can access your tasks when no internet connection is available. Activate offline mode by clicking “Offline” and following the prompted install for Google Gears.

Remember The Milk for iPhone and Android

I haven’t used Remember The Milk’s phone application yet, but I hear its definitely worth donating a few dollars monthly to use it. Doing so will turn you Remember The Milk lists into a portable task management system. I’ll donate to use it later this year when the new Google Nexus phone for Verizon comes out.

Wish list

• Ability to move events around in the “Weekly Planner” view.
• I want Offline mode to actually stay activate and not randomly vanish at times (its happened several times and it forces me to reinstall Google Gears every time).
• Where is a Calendar view? They offer an iCalendar view, but I don’t have a Mac.
• If Milk is going to have labels they need to be accessible. Right now its a feature thats a real pain to use.
• Being able to add time to tasks is great, but why can’t I set a default amount of time for tasks?