How I Recreated Things in Remember the Milk

I‘ll admit it – I’m a tweaker. As an unabashed nerd girl with N.A.D.D., I spend a lot of time chasing after the next Shiny New Thing, and there is nothing more tweakable to me than task management systems.

I’m not a staunch adherent to the GTD system, preferring a more free-flowing way of managing tasks, so when I came across Cultured Code’s Things back when I first got an iPhone, I swallowed hard and coughed up the £5.99. This was the app I had seen on the home screens of so many tech writers, designers and developers. And oooh, it is so pretty!

Seriously. Look at it. Even the icon looks like it belongs on the home screen, and that is one of the things I take into consideration when picking my apps (I am also slightly shallow in my shiny-hunting).

But the development of this app has been slow and features seem to take a long time to show up. Recently, I was overjoyed to see that Things has finally implemented repeating tasks on the iPhone (I have no Mac to sync repeating tasks from), but it doesn’t get away from the issue of ubiquitous access to my tasks. For that, I have been using Remember the Milk.

The flexibility of Remember the Milk is both a boon and a drawback. For those of you with tweakaholism, enter with caution. This nifty little service can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. For me, the tweaking became a quest to recreate my favourite features of Things in Remember the Milk, namely, the Next and Someday lists.

The Basic Setup: Things You Need to Know
If you’re already skilled in RTM, this may well be all you need to know.

Areas in Things = Lists in Remember the Milk
Today in Things = Smart List in Remember the Milk with criteria due:today OR dueBefore:today
Next in Things = Smart List in Remember the Milk with criteria due:never NOT tag:sm
Scheduled in Things = Smart List in Remember the Milk with criteria ((dueWithin:”1 month of today” OR dueBefore:today) AND status:incomplete)
Someday in Things = Smart List in Remember the Milk with criteria tag:sm

If you’re a complete RTM novice and have no idea what Smart Lists are or how to use them, Remember the Milk has a handy official guide which can explain them far better than I would be able to.

Three Easy Steps to Setting Up Your Things-like System
First, create your ‘Areas’ (short for Areas of Responsibility), which in RTM will be represented by the standard, grey-coloured lists at the top of the screen. I have lists for Personal, Home & Garden, Study, Guiding and Work, but yours may vary.

When you add tasks to RTM, pick the appropriate list.

Second, have a look at your tags list. Yes, that giant cloud of words on the right of your screen needs tidying up. Go on a blasting mission, clearing out tags you no longer use and adding ones you think you will need. GTD contexts make good tags, so make sure you’ve got an @errands tag and a @calls tag at the very least.

Create a tag called ‘sm’ or something similar. You will be using this for your Someday/Maybe tasks.

But what about Locations?
Remember the Milk has a Locations feature which shows all your tasks on a map according to where you need to do them. Go right ahead and add @Home, @Work, @School, etc. locations instead of tags if you like the look of that system (I do… I warned you about my Shiny Things addiction).

Now you’re ready to create your Smart Lists.

Perform searches for the following terms, and save those searches as Smart Lists. Call them anything you like! I like to keep my Smart List names short, so I’ve got ! for Today, N for Next and ? for Someday/Maybe.

Today: due:today OR dueBefore:today
Next: due:never NOT tag:sm
Someday: tag:sm

Erm, Aren’t You Forgetting Something?
You may notice from my Next list criteria that my Next Actions do not have due dates. In Things, items with dates go in the Scheduled list.

To create a Scheduled list, a search string along these lines should whip one up:

((dueWithin:”1 month of today” OR dueBefore:today) AND status:incomplete)

Obviously, if you want to display tasks due within two months, a year, a week, etc, just change that search string. You could also exclude tasks in the Today list by adding NOT due:today to the end of the string.

Experiment with this one to find out just how far ahead you want to see (remember, typing nothing in the search field and hitting enter will return a list of all your tasks). My Scheduled list is, quite simply, S.

Why I Have No “Next Action” Tag
Remember the Milk’s task editing system bothers me. It takes multiple clicks/taps to edit a task, and so I have come to the conclusion that removing ‘na’ or similar from every task I want to get to soon is too much hassle. Tasks in the Someday list, however, probably won’t be edited as frequently. Taking a single tag off there still requires multiple steps, but due to the nature of Someday/Maybe tasks, it doesn’t bug me as much.

Using the System
OK, so you add a task “Pick up the milk” to Remember the Milk. You decide that as the milk is for the whole household, it will go in your Home & Garden area, so you send it to that list. It is then given the tag @errands and possibly a location of @Supermarket. You’re not sure when you’re going to be able to pick up the milk, but you know it won’t be today, so you don’t set a due date and fire the task off into the ether.

Now what?

Well, you decide to have a nosy through your Next list to see what you’ve got left to do. You spot the “Pick up the milk” task and decide you can do it today. You change the due date to today, and hit save. The task now shows up in your Today list.

When you bring the milk home, you notice that the kitchen door is getting a little bit loose. But it’s not too bad, so you don’t need to get round to it in the near future. It’s a good candidate for the Someday list.

Create the task “Fix kitchen door” in Home & Garden and give it the ‘sm’ tag. It doesn’t need a due date, as you don’t know when you can do it (that’s what Scheduled is for, remember?). Now, when you save it, it will go into your Someday list. When the door starts getting a little wobblier, moving the task to Next is as simple as removing the ‘sm’ tag.

Limitations – Projects
Ah, projects. A bit of a sticky topic, seeing as RTM is flatly refusing to acknowledge the problems caused by a lack of subtasks by claiming tagging and list creation is enough. But, you know, not all of us want a screen full of lists for every project, or a cluttered tag cloud. RTM really needs to admit it is in the wrong on this one. I tried using Toodledo to escape the lack of projects, but the interface is disappointing and clunky…

But in the meantime, we’re going to have to use tags, and prefix those tags so they float to the top of the tag cloud for easier access. I use the . (period/full stop) character in front of my project names.

If you’re going on vacation, create your .vacation tag and put that tag on all the relevant tasks. Things displays project next actions in the Next list, so if you want a cloned system, you can leave your Smart Lists exactly as they are now. If that method annoys you, change your Next Smart List criteria to due:never NOT (tag:sm OR tagContains:.) to exclude project tasks.

Limitations – No Separate Start/Scheduled and Due Dates
In Things, you can set a task to show up in your Today list before its due date. Say I want to print off a new sheaf of Cook Badge worksheets for my Brownies. The due date will be the date of the next meeting, but I want to do it before then so I’ve got it all set and am not left shouting at the printer because I’ve got to be out of the door.

In Things, I simply set the due date to one date and the Scheduled date for an earlier date. I cannot do this in RTM, and it bites hard for tasks like this. So far, I set the due date to the day the task is actually due, then dig through my Scheduled list looking for tasks I can check off before the due dates. There are several ‘workarounds’ on the RTM forums that might be better.

The Logbook
And finally… if you want a Things-style logbook of your completed tasks, simply create a Smart List for status:completed.

Now you can pat yourself on the back more efficiently!

The Final Finally…
This system is far from perfect and probably has more than a few bugs or things I haven’t considered. But it’s an evolving, ever-tweaking work in progress, and who knows – this system might be exactly what someone is looking for.

[image credit: awesome 'Milk' carton by ~moutzouris at deviantART]