Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Push yourself with Push Notifications
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 by Emily Boyd
RTM user odelaney is training for the Marathon des Sables, 2011 — a 7-day running race, 150 miles across the Sahara Desert! He's come up with a creative way of motivating himself, combining tasks with Push Notifications from the iPhone app. This is a great way to keep your motivation up, whether you're training for an ultramarathon or not! odelaney explains:
I needed some extra motivation for some things in my life, so I came up with the idea of using RTM to help me out. Now that we have push notifications for the iPhone, it seems well suited to giving me the extra nudges I need during my day to keep off the smokes and keep up with my training.
I thought others may find this useful, so here's how I'm doing it:
I've created a new list called "motivator" to keep all these reminders from cluttering up my inbox.
Within this list I've created reminders to nudge me 3 times a day about why I want to stop smoking (at the key times I want to light up – first thing in the morning, after lunch, after dinner); and once a day to give me a kick up the arse and go for a run.
The quit smoking nudges I want to vary as much as possible, so I've created unique motivators for each key moment of the day, and each day of the week, i.e. 3 nudges x 7 days, so 21 unique statements. Then each week, I'll shuffle them up a bit so it doesn't get repetitive. Same for the training motivators. And they're set to repeat weekly, so when I check them off each day, the following week's one becomes active.
So, now I'm getting these motivators throughout the day as push notification messages on my iPhone, then, if all goes to plan, I'll check them off as complete before I go to bed.
It's looking something like this:
Thanks for sharing this tip, odelaney — you’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week. Best of luck with your training! :)
Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum and add a new thread and let us know how you use RTM. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.
Milk the Cow Dashboard Widget for OS X
Thursday, August 20, 2009 by Emily Boyd
If you're looking for a neat way to check out your tasks from your Dashboard, this widget might be for you. Rich Hong's recently updated Milk the Cow widget allows you to view (and filter!) your Remember The Milk tasks, and easily add and complete individual tasks.
For more useful tools for Remember The Milk, head on over to the Services page. Inspired by Rich and want to create a widget for your favourite platform too? Check out the API and get hacking!
Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Peeking at the week ahead with Smart Lists
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by Emily Boyd
This week's winner, RTM user calexo, shared a cool Smart List set up that helps to keep the week nice and organised. calexo has different Smart Lists to show tasks that are overdue, due today, due tomorrow, and completed today (for end-of-the-day satisfaction!).
My favourite, though, is the Smart List with this criteria:
dueWithin:"1 week of today" AND NOT due:today AND NOT due:tomorrow
This Smart List will show all tasks due in the next 7 days (excluding today/tomorrow), providing a quick way to peek ahead and see which tasks are coming up. Thanks for sharing this tip, calexo!
Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum and add a new thread and let us know how you use RTM. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.
Remember The Milk is a-Twitter
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by Emily Boyd
We're big fans of Twitter, and we know that many Remember The Milk users are too (well, there's 40,000 of you following @rtm, which allows you to manage your tasks via Twitter, if that's any indication!).
We're excited to announce that the RTM team is now on Twitter @rememberthemilk. In addition to communicating with RTM users, we'll be tweeting product news, tips & tricks, interesting links, and more (who knows, Bob might even make an appearance). If you have any suggestions for what else you'd like to see, send us an @reply. :)
Want to keep in the loop about upgrades, outages, and related issues too? Follow @rtmstatus for updates.
Meet the Remember The Milk team: Andrew on support
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by Emily Boyd
Everyone knows about Bob T. Monkey, but who else is part of the RTM team? In this new series of "Meet the team" posts, I'll introduce (and quiz!) my fellow human team members. First up, I'd like you to meet Andrew Conkling, tech support engineer.
Andrew, what were you doing before you joined RTM? What brought you here?
Before I joined RTM, I was working at a technical support company in Philadelphia, PC Helps. I specialized in mobile devices and enjoyed helping people be as productive as possible in their work.
My wife's company recently decided to relocate to Atlanta, and I heard about the open position at RTM just as I was looking for a job, so it was pretty excellent timing.
Tell us a little bit about what you do at RTM.
I answer the questions and help identify the problems that our users ask and report, whether on the forums or via email. I try to identify any larger issues and help identify what people would like to see.
You're the newest member of the team; what's your favorite part of the job so far?
I have most enjoyed answering questions about how to do particular things with RTM. Plenty of people have a few lists of tasks, but it's interesting to combine a lot of the different features that RTM provides—e.g. tags, locations, and some clever searches saved as Smart Lists—to use their tasks in dozens of ways, all at once! It's really fun to be a part of that, to help think of new ways RTM can be used, especially when I hadn't thought of them before. The forums are brimming with excellent ideas and I wish I'd spent more time on them in years past!
Can you describe how you use RTM? What does your set-up look like?
My setup has evolved a bit since I started using RTM a few years ago. I'm a big proponent of GTD—well, its principles at least: having one list for everything, getting everything you need to do out of your head, organizing your list by contexts; my RTM setup has mirrored that from the beginning. While I had a BlackBerry, I had a List for each context and two additional ones, one specifically for wedding plans and one for shared tasks with my (now) wife. So I had about a half dozen or so Lists… and probably about 20 Smart Lists—easily my favorite RTM feature! I just got an iPhone, however, and plan to reorganize my Smart Lists more by tags and less by List.
As far as services, I typically use the website for my semi-weekly review (it's the most efficient for "heavy lifting"), use the iPhone app heavily for day-to-day, and love the Gmail Firefox extension for helping me clear my Inbox.
Besides tech, what are your hobbies and interests?
I do have a lot of tech hobbies, but aside from that I enjoy others too. Particularly being in a new city, I enjoy getting out and exploring international cuisine—Thai, Szechuan, and Indian are probably my favorites. I'm also becoming more interested in drinks of all kinds: coffee, tea, beer, and wine. It's amazing the worldwide trip you can take with just those four!
I am also a big fan of music. I grew up playing the piano and the guitar, and while the last few years have seen less playing, I hope to get back into it soon. I love classical music, and I also listen to a lot of post-rock. I also enjoy watching films across all genres; my list is far too long for my incredibly slow pace! I'm currently partway through an Ingmar Bergman marathon that has long ago exceeded my wife's patience for his films. :)
Thanks, Andrew!
Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Managing recipes and meals
Tuesday, August 11, 2009 by Emily Boyd
We have two Tips & Tricks Tuesday winners this week! Thanks to RTM users nluoma and jkalvin, who both shared interesting tips for a pretty different, useful way to use the app: managing recipes (and we think Bob might need some help, judging by the pic below–what on earth is he making?!). nluoma starts:
I use RTM to manage my recipes and meals. I enter the recipe name as the task name, and put the recipe on the Notes field. I can use tags to categorize them, and can then browse through my recipes quickly to schedule a week or two of meals at a time and put together my shopping list.
Then, all I have to do is look at today's schedule to see what's for dinner. Once the meal is done, I change the due date to never and it's ready for rescheduling.
jkalvin builds on this tip:
I love this idea! In fact I have had a similar method in mind for a while now (but I have yet to implement it). I myself would use the Notes field to put the recipe instructions (as you do), but have the ingredients as separate tasks tied to the recipes/meals with tags. That way you could semi-automatically generate grocery lists. I imagine the "tagContains" search term would be rather useful in accomplishing this.
What I like about your method is that you consider scheduling of meals; I dare say you could even extend that using the recurring feature. You could create smartlists that display the next X amount of days ahead of you.
Thanks to both nluoma and jkalvin for sharing!
Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum and add a new thread and let us know how you use RTM. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.
More Cowbell
Wednesday, August 5, 2009 by Emily Boyd
When we added customizable alert sounds to the iPhone app a few weeks ago, we were curious: would more folks prefer to have their iPhone "moo" or ring with a cowbell when tasks are due?
Well, the results are in! Of those who chose a custom sound (we're not interested in those boring people who went with the default sound), 56% went for the cowbell and a respectable 44% selected the "moo".
If you're one of the aforementioned unexciting people with the default alert sound set, why not switch today? Visit the Settings screen in the app, and you too can experience slight awkwardness when you receive a reminder while in a quiet elevator with strangers (just explain there's a cow in your pocket, they'll understand).
Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Making shopping easier
Tuesday, August 4, 2009 by Emily Boyd
This week, RTM user morgan.parker shares a neat tip that uses a shared list for ultra-efficient shopping.
My husband and I use a shared RTM list for our grocery shopping. Each of us can put items on the list when we think of it from either work, home or via our smartphones and whoever is doing the shopping always has an up-to-date list. It works especially well as we often stop in to pick up one or two items, but we can also see what else needs to be bought. We use the 'priority' function to separate our items into the general areas of the supermarket, to make it easier to sort through a long list.
As an added bonus, if we are shopping together we can split up and tackle the shopping from different ends of the supermarket. We 'complete' each item on our phones as it goes in the trolley so we don't double up or miss anything. It probably looks a bit strange to other people when we stand in the vegetable section staring at our phones, but it really works well.
Thanks for sharing this tip, morgan.parker! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week. :)
Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum and add a new thread and let us know how you use RTM. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.