I Forget Things

I'll go upstairs and forget why. I'll buy all ingredients for the recipe but one from the store. Worst and most frequent of all is the truly intended but ultimately doomed I'll call you. But I'm a geek and that usually spells hope.

Historically, my attempts at todo lists rather quickly became oppressively comprehensive anthologies of failure. There was this one time I had a tiny pocket calendar and an equally tiny pen and a rubber band. That actually worked really well until I lost it in a grown-up's jungle gym in St. Louis. Fans of the PDA/smart-phone are probably scratching their heads right now. Bulk, yo; I'm a pockets man and just don't have room for those bricks. And they try to be too many things at once, in my opinion. (The iPhone is a sweet step in the right direction, but I'll wait for a bit more innovation.) Victory was eventually mine, and that victory was Remember the Milk.

The best part of RTM is how well its designers accommodate my cell phone. After a one-time setup, if you give an RTM task a due time instead of just a a due date, it will send an email 30 minutes prior. Since all phones have an email address†, I configured RTM to remind me about really important tasks – no matter where I am – by sending a text to my cell phone.

So RTM can send stuff to my phone, but can my phone send stuff to RTM? Answer: yes yes. I can send a text message to a provided email address with a wee bit of formatting (a T: here and D: there) and the task shows up presto. Alternatively, RTM cooperates with Jott.

I actually found Jott weeks before RTM. It helped me not forget things since it takes just a 30 second (tops-ish) phone call to put a transcribed email in my inbox. Schuper schweet. But it's not a task manager. Jott and RTM recognized one another's awesomeness and now I can use Jott to make a phone call that results in a new task in my RTM list. Me saying "Buy tooth paste, 8pm" while riding in the car to the North Carolina airport means I get a text message on the drive home from MCI.

RTM is proactive and not blind; the designers have hooked into the services Google provides. There's a Gmail/Firefox widget as well as an iGoogle widget. This means we Google users can access RTM within our conventional, daily web destinations. (Also, for Mac users, there's a plug-in for the indispensable Quicksilver launcher.)

RTM and Jott have helped me form an integrated todo system that functions way beyond a list. With accessibility from my cell phone and my email, I'm never out of reach. Of course, it's just as easy to ignore RTM as with other todo lists, but I've found I kind of enjoy using this one and that helps me stick to it. It is comprehensive, convenient, and free‡.

If you would like help setting this up, I'll provide some step by step instructions in response to the first of such requests posted in the comments.

† To find your email address, write the best joke you know in a text message on your phone. When you go to send it, you should see an option to enter an email address. Put your own email address in there. Your phone's email address will be waiting in your inbox. There are easier ways online, but the search works best given a particular provider and I don't know yours.
‡ Except for the ubiquitous text message fees.