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Remember The Milk - Getting things done...
Remember The Milk is one of the best ways to manage your tasks.
- Manage tasks quickly and easily
- Thanks to a natural language interface, adding tasks due "next friday" means just that and not fiddling around with a mini calendar
- Getting reminded, anywhere
- Reminders can be received pretty much anywhere such as email, SMS, Instant Messengers, Twitter and RSS
- Organising the way you want to
- Lists, tags and notes oh my! Remember The Milk has the flexible to power to make it as simple or feature rich as suits
- Locate your tasks
- Give tasks a location and see a map of where you need to be getting things done
- Collaboration
- Sharing, sending and publishing of tasks makes Remember The Milk an ideal application for project management and collaboration projects
- Add tasks wherever you are
- You can add tasks via email, web, twitter, your phone (there is an iPhone app) more. So you don't need to remember to write your task down in your system later!
The fallacy of email productivity
Background - Email as a productivity tool is, in my opinion, a bad idea and here are some trends / reasons why:
"According to recent analysis by the Online Publishers Association (OPA), more people than ever are spending their time online visiting content sites which provide news, information, and entertainment. Despite the emergence of social networks, and in particular the rapid growth of Facebook, it’s content sites which engage web surfers’ attention the most these days – time spent on these sites is up 88% from only five years ago. That’s not to say social networking community sites haven’t grown too, it’s just that their growth hasn’t come at the expense of content. Instead, people are using traditional communication sites and services (think webmail, IM, and discussion groups) less and less and choosing to use Facebook and other social networks instead."
Source - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_eats_away_at_email_usage_on_tod...
The guys at 37Signals seem to have a similar philosphoy to me given this post http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2009/10/how-can-i-get-my-coworkers-...
- Conversation Threads - yes there is Gmail. But not 100% of the world's email users do so with Gmail. Further in a business context the application there is Outlook which attempts threads but fails. Email lacks the ability to construct and record conversations. Conversations are the interaction between people making decisions for next steps. Critical stuff. Especially in a business context, email is not the right tool for facilitating communications.
- Rich Media - in email, rich media gets dumbed down to attachments. Granted some applications, example again being Gmail, handle rich media so that the message is as the sender intended. This is the exception not the rule though. Messages supplemented by documents, images and video become messages only with attachments which may or may not work with your email application / computer operating system / applications
- Immediacy - email is a tool with inherent lag. I send email. Email response arrives when? It goes in to the ether... There is no framework to manage and progress the attempts of conversation.
Moreover than features are the use cases we have for email. They're insane. For me communications is this:
Business Networking - Linkedin - a rolodex on steroids with messaging built in. When I get a business message via LinkedIn I have so much more context to the sender thus the conversation than a stand alone email.
Home Networking - Skype / Social Media - My grandparents see their great granddaughter when they get in touch. They dont get caught up with email messages and attachments. For short messages we have the common platform of Facebook. If my grandparents are struggling to do something I don't have to decipher what email application they're using nor what file type the attachment is.
Production / Project Management / GTD - Collaboration Platforms such as Box.net - Assets such as documents and images are stored centrally with contextual comments of conversation. Progress is the upload of a new file or completion of an assigned task. I see this as a list of activities in an RSS feed. I do not need to wade through 30emails to work out we've
completed a graphic.
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