I’ve discovered yet another way to organize my busy schedule. At rememberthemilk.com, I can manage my personal to-do list (like scheduling that dentist appointment or buying groceries), my school to-do list (like reading for Communication Law or studying for an exam), and my extra-curricular to-do list (like scheduling chapter meetings for NSCS or writing a Fulbright essay).
My rating for Remember The Milk is 9/10. The features are easy to use and provide a wealth of organizational opportunities.For example, tasks can be organized into different lists. Within these lists, you can tag items. The list I use most often is “Study.” Within “Study,” there is a tag for each of my classes – i.e. honrs296, tcom384, eng425. I have found that this makes maintaining an up-to-date to-do list much more simple. Another terrific feature is notes. If the title section of the task is not enough to explain it, there is a sidebar where the user can write notes. At first, I worried that I would forget I wrote a note but Remember The Milk places a small note icon next to tasks that have notes.
Though I do not use a smart phone, I learned that the application for Remember The Milk pulls the whole experience together. The website turned application is easy to use and great for on-the-go scheduling. If you are using another type of mobile device, you can request daily text messages with your tasks. Additionally, Remember The Milk provides an inbox list for tasks that you remember AFK. You can use your phone to send it to your task list. Another application that utilizes Remember The Milk is Google Calendar. Before Remember The Milk, I would make all-day events to remind myself of tasks that I needed to complete. Now, a check mark appears on each day and I can look at Remember The Milk tasks. Overall, it makes for a lot less clutter.
You may ask, why not a 10/10? My response is that, like most websites, there is room for improvement. Ideally, I would prefer not to type out the date every time I enter a task from my syllabus. Even though typing ^ before the date is pretty quick, a small, simple calendar would allow me to enter due dates at the click of a button. A feature that I would love to see added to Remember The Milk is a syllabus reader. Most of my professors email syllabi with detailed outlines of due dates. If Remember The Milk could make the task input for simple course syllabi even easier, I’d save several hours of typing “Read Ch. 3 ^09/13/2011,” “Read Ch. 4 ^09/22/2011,” and so on.
Overall, my life is MUCH more organized and manageable thanks to Remember The Milk. Creating an account is free and I highly recommend it if you have a busy schedule with more than one to-do list at any given time.
Jessica Hoffmann is a Ball State University student from Lafayette, Indiana. She will graduate in the spring of 2012 with a major in Telecommunications – Digital Production and a minor in Theatre. Aside from studying, Jessica spends her time working at two jobs, serving as the President for the BSU chapter of National Society of Collegiate Scholars, and serving on the board for Indiana Zeta Alpha Psi Omega. She enjoys spending time with her friends and family, learning new languages, watching TV shows, and going to the movies.