Extendably.com

Remember The Milk, and anything else you need to

Written by Angelo on Friday, October 31st, 2008

I’m a terribly forgetful person. If I’m not being constantly reminded of something, then the chances are I’ll never remember it. So it probably comes as no surprise that I have a whole lot of ways that I try and stay organized, and most of them are inter-linked. One way that I have really come to rely on is using Remember The Milk, however I don’t bother with the actual website. I’m sure it’s very well organized, but the idea of having to click multiple things, just to create a to-do list, is beyond me. I don’t want to have to organize by location or tabs, I just want to write down what I need to do. And the Remember The Milk extension for Gmail is perfect.

This Extension is, of course, Firefox only, but is designed to work only with Gmail. What it does is add a little bar to the right side where you can store quite bits of information on things that you need to do.

The ease of use of such a task manager (It uses AJAX to reduce page refreshes) is immediately noted. It doesn’t seem to offer you much in the way of options but that’s perfect for a simple task manager. All you want it for is to just remember what you tell it and spit it back when you need it. You simply add a task to the input bar and it adds it to your task list. The bonus is that it even recognizes time inputs. As you can see from the sample task being added, you can add a time, or even a date, and the Remember The Milk addon takes care of the rest.

Also just because options aren’t present at first glance, doesn’t mean they aren’t present at all. Mousing over a specific task lets you change the name, due date, and a whole host of other options from a simple overlaid window.

The RTM addon for Firefox is a must-have for boosting productivity, especially if you seem to keep that Gmail tab open all day. It provides you with quick access to your task-list in the easiest and simplist possible way.

As a bonus, if you use the RTM website, you’ll be happy to know that the addon actually syncs up with that as well. Meaning you can update either one, and still know that all your tasks will constantly be served up, from wherever you are.

The website is also one of the few implementors of Google’s ‘Gears’ technology which enables you to open and use the website as you would desktop software, both online and offline with your data syncronising inbetween. I find Gears has some annoying problems on occasions but its still a better solution than most task managers provide.