Lately I’ve found myself using Notepad to organize myself more than Google Calendar. I have been a big fan of Google Calendar for over a year now, but sometimes it’s just nice to write things down in a list instead of separating them by due date. For the past week, I’ve been swamped with projects and homework, so I’ve just been jotting them down in Notepad and then going through my list to see what I can get done.

Today, I remembered about Remember The Milk (RTM), which I don’t think I’ve ever covered on my blog before. In fact, I just did a search on my blog and I haven’t mentioned it anywhere. I created an account on RTM a while back just to see what the fuss was all about, but I only visited my account once or twice. I went back on there today to see if maybe I could use it to keep better track of my random tasks that I had been using. I found out that RTM is perfect for what I wanted.

I’m so used to using Google products on the internet for keeping myself organized, and it’s actually kind of nice to be using something else. RTM lets me easily add my tasks to a list that I specify. Then I can set a due date and time, and give my tasks other properties like how long the task will last. I could also give them a priority if I wanted, like if I had a huge exam coming up then I could give it a high priority. It’s also easy to integrate RTM into Google Calendar. All you have to do is follow the instructions and it will put a little check mark icon on each day in Google Calendar. When you click on this icon it will display your RTM tasks, and you even have the option to add tasks. You also have the option whether you want it to display tasks with no due date.

I also have my Google Calendar synced with my Lighting addon for Thunderbird, so I wanted to see if I could sync my RTM calendar with Thunderbird as well. I was able to do this easily by making a new calendar in Thunderbird with the RTM iCalendar URL, but the only difference is that it will only show your tasks in the task list and not on the calendar. If you instead use the RTM iCalendar (Events) URL, it will show any events with a due date on your calendar, but then it will not show any tasks without a due date. I guess you could use both, but that would probably result in tasks being repeated.

So after using it quite extensively today, and trying out many of the features, I can say that I will probably be using RTM to keep myself organized at least for the rest of this semester. Also, I found this nice program called Bubbles that is kind of like Mozilla’s Prism where it will run RTM in a window of it’s own. This way it can also be minimized to the system tray for easy access. For more information on how to use RTM, and to get the most out of it, I’d recommend visiting Lifehacker’s post on “Get Organized with Remember the Milk.”