For the longest time I’ve been using pen and paper to keep track of my day to day tasks. Needless to say that was not very efficient. Half of the time I would displace my notepad and not find it for days. Keeping a list neatly organized on a notepad is also problematic, since the best you can do is mark out a completed task, or you have to rewrite the entire list on occasion if you want to keep it nice and neat. I never cared much for personal digital assistants (PDAs) either, since I always found them to bulky compared to a regular cellular phone. To make a long story short, for the longest time I used my old faithful notepad before it dawned on me that there has to be a better way – like keeping track of to do items online. I did a quick search, and was quickly overwhelmed by the myriad of choices available – obviously a slew of startups had similar ideas. Lucky for me, I ran across a couple of articles that compared some of these to-do lists, and if not that, at least gave a brief description of the main features for each. You can find these articles here and here. Most of these applications are free, so you can sign up for several and try them all out, depending on how much time you want to devote to finding the ultimate to-do list. In the end I ended up going with rememebrthemilk.com, simply because most sites seemed to have a rather favorable opinion of it, and it had a catchy name. I’ve been utilizing it for several weeks now and so far it has been very useful – I already feel more organized! Here are a few things that I found: First and foremost, it is very easy to use and it takes only minutes to get started. You can have as many to-do lists as you need each with individual tasks, due dates, estimated times for tasks, map locations, etc. You can share lists with friends or business partners, which comes in very handy when you have more tasks than you can handle yourself. Task alerts can be delivered in a variety of ways including text-messaging, email, and instant messenger. There is also a mobile version of this application available, meaning you can easily view and edit your lists through your phone from anywhere and at any time. I have my cell phone on me a lot more often than my laptop, so this is definitely a plus. Anyhow, if you need a to-do list and the regular pen and paper approach is not working for you, give it a try.
remember the milk
