My GTD-Workflow with Remember The Milk

19.05.09 – 19:52

During the last two weeks I have been implementing a new Getting Things Done Workflow to my life with Remember The Milk as the key service for it.

My old workflow:
In the old days I was organising myself with a paper organiser. I had a calendar and context lists. I tried to keep up with the lists, but had several problems with it. I just never really gained a fully overview about my tasks, because I always had to skip through sites and sites of lists.

So I started to abandon the lists and only switched to using the calender. This lead to all the problems for which I had implemented GTD to my life in the first place.

To get hold of my tasks again, I started to do daily task lists. Iterating from day to day, this worked okay, but I wasn’t able to organise many tasks and long term tasks were a no-go.

But the biggest problem was, that I wasn’t able to access my tasks everywhere. I had to carry my calendar (which I forget sometimes or which wasn’t possible to carry everywhere). Also I had no convenience functions like recurring tasks. And another drawback was the backup problem. If I would lose my organiser someday, I would not have any backup.

My new workflow:
I was buying a Nokia E 51 some weeks ago and wanted to integrate it in the workflow. After doing some research I was pointed to Remember The Milk. It is a webservice for organising your tasks. So I gave it a run, liked it, bought a pro account and am happy ever since

I organised my task in Remember The Milk according to this video. I abandonded “Places” from the beginning and only used contexts. I included some more extra tags and still tweak the system from time to time.

I use Remember The Milk on my Mac with Fluid. Google Gears is supported, so I can seamlessly switch from online to offline and back. It’s just like another desktop app.

Rememeber the Milk is for tasks only. I use iCal for all the appointments I have to be physically present. But still, i sync Remember The Milk with iCal to see my tasks that are scheduled for particullar days in iCal as well.

iCal is synced with my mobile. The E 51 features a quick look on the “desktop”, so i only have to release the keylock to view the calendar.

To view the tasks, that are not in the calendar, because they don’t have a due date, I use the build in browser and m.rememberthemilk.com. I assigned a shortcut to it, so I’m always just one button away from my tasks. The only drawback with the browser thing is, that it doesn’t support offline access.

To compensate this a bit, I use email to save new tasks. They are automatically sent when I’m online again, so there is no delay with being in sync to the webservice.

I also always try to carry a small paper block (11 cm x 7cm) with me, because sometimes paper is most handy in meetings (or with flat battery).

Dependency on battery and required online access are the major drawbacks of the workflow, but since I can recharge my devices constantly and have online acces nearly everywhere (wifi + umts/gprs), this workflow allows me more overall access time than my paper workflow, where I forgot my organiser just way to often.

I hope that Remember The Milk release a Symbian S 60 app for my Nokia soon (or that I finally grab an iPhone).

[ ... task "write gtd blogpost" from my @mac list -> done ... ]