Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Spotify + Remember The Milk
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 by Emily Boyd
This week's tip, shared by odelaney (who's lucky enough to have access to Spotify :), describes a great way to keep track of all the awesome new music you've always meant to listen to which has somehow gotten lost in a huge playlist:
I'm an avid Spotify user, and love finding new music to listen to. However, I've got heaps of playlists and I was often adding stuff to listen to later, then forgetting about it, losing it in my ever increasing list of music.
It just occurred to me today, wouldn't it be cool if I could add albums/artists/tunes to RTM, stuff that I'd like to listen to when I get the chance.
So I tried dragging a link from Spotify into the Smart Add field of RTM, and it works! It adds the URL to the task, then I just tag it with .spotify, and I created a Smart List based on this tag, and hey presto, I have a list of stuff I want to listen to, but not necessarily keep in a permanent playlist. I can now open artists/albums directly from RTM when I have the opportunity to listen to some tunes. Sweet.
Thanks for sharing this tip, odelaney! 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, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. 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.
Posted in: Tips & Tricks
Tips & Tricks Tuesday: The perfect bill organizer
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 by Emily Boyd
Bills. There's a lot of them and they're everywhere. No one likes bills, but there's one good thing about them — they've got due dates. And we all know where due dates love to live: Remember The Milk!
This week, andrewcilento shares his tips on managing bills in Remember The Milk:
Like many other people, I have far too many different bills to pay each month. Keeping track of them all used to be a real hassle, but thanks to Remember The Milk, things are much easier. Here's what I do:
- For each bill, I set up a new task named after the bill in question and the day of the month it's generally due (for example, my AT&T bill is usually due on the 5th of every month, though occasionally it'll be on the 8th).
- I set it up to repeat monthly.
- If it's a bill that has a fixed monthly minimum payment (student loans, car payments, etc.) I add that information in a note, along with the URL to log into the site if online billing is available.
- Set as priority level 2. I use priority solely so that when I look at my list of tasks in Gmail (using the Firefox extension), which is where I see them most often, I can immediately tell what bills, if any, are due soon. I use priority level 2 because I like the color, but any other level would work just as well for this purpose.
- Tag as "bill." I saved a search for "tag:bill" so that they're all grouped together.
And that's my setup. When I get my statements every month, I open them up, check the due date and minimum payment and adjust each task accordingly, and then file the statements away so they don't clutter up my desk.
I know this is a really basic setup, but it works for me, and I thought I'd share it in case it's useful for anyone else. Enjoy!
Thanks for sharing this tip, andrewcilento! 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, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. 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.
Posted in: Tips & Tricks
Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Use a Smart List to auto-populate properties for super-fast task addition
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 by Emily Boyd
This week's tip, shared by andyjpowell_work, describes a powerful trick you can use to quickly capture tasks with Smart Lists:
At work I often have people phoning, or dropping by my desk, asking me to do things. "Can you check this?" "Can you follow up on that?" I need somewhere to record these reminders, effectively tasks, and started using RTM a couple of years back.
The Smart Add feature has improved my ability to quickly add tasks. Unfortunately I found that I would type the topic into the Smart Add box, hit Enter, and off it would go into the ether. Why? Because I use only Smart Lists, based on dates and tags, to manage my work and, because I didn't type any details in when I was Smart Adding, none of my Smart Lists would pick the task up.
Some might suggest I take the time to enter these details properly, before saving the task, but I found it’s not effective to sit at my desk typing hieroglyphics such as ! @ # ^ * = while I’m speaking to a colleague.
I recently overcame my issue by setting up a new Smart List, called “Quick Add”. Rather than using it to find tasks, I’m using it to auto-populate some basic default details using RTM’s amazing “Inheriting task properties” feature whereby “tasks added in Smart Lists will use that list's criteria”.
The Smart List search criteria for my "Quick Add" list is:
due:today and priority:2 and tag:general and timeEstimate:"10 mins”So now when I have to quickly add a task, as a colleague is yabbering away, I just click on my “Quick Add” list, type the task name, and hit Enter. I can be assured it will show up in today’s tasks, with priority 2, tagged with "general", and with a 10 minute time estimate. I can then either complete the task today or adjust the details to look at another day.
Thanks for sharing this tip, andyjpowell_work! 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, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. 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.
Posted in: Tips & Tricks
