Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Creating "bucket lists" for better living
Tuesday, March 29, 2011 by Andrew Conkling
If you use Remember The Milk to keep track of everything, you may want to create a Smart List for those less urgent tasks that would be satisfying to complete. This week's tip, shared by lon247, highlights a way to create so-called bucket lists:
There are things that I've always wanted to do (and often forget about) that really don't take long – that are non-urgent but I'd deem important in the end of it all.
ie. reading a certain short story with my daughter, or getting together with a certain set of old friends. It doesn't need to get done, but when I've got a block of time, and I don't feel like being in the zone and productive, I'd love to have a list of stuff that actually brings joy to my life.
I'm trying keep a simple habit of making a note of duration with the = Smart Add, ie.
watch particular TED video =20 min #backburner
or
research and plan skydiving trip for our anniversary =2 hr #backburner
My backburner list includes more serious projects, but it's generally stuff without a due date.
And then the magic happens with the Smart Lists.
I have bucket list 1 for fun things I've wanted to do under 30 minutes:
timeEstimate:"< 31min" AND list:backburner
and one for under 3 hours:
timeEstimate:"< 181min" AND list:backburner
I couldn't find a less than or equal to operator, and by convention I'd usually type 30 minutes or 3hr – Remember The Milk translates that 181 minutes into 3 hours and 1 minutes for you.
And voila – lists for all the non-urgent stuff you always wanted to do before you 'kick the bucket'!
Thanks for sharing this tip, lon247! 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
Seeking 100 testers for our iPad app
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 by Emily Boyd
The launch of our iPad app is right around the corner, but we have one thing left to do: test!
We're super excited about this app, and would love to be able to invite every single member of our Pro Tester Program to help us test, but this time we're looking for just 100 testers. (Why 100? That's the magic number of iPads that Apple lets us authorize for testing.)
So, how are we going to decide which 100 nice people receive invites? We toyed around with the idea of planting tickets in chocolate bars, but decided to keep things simple, much to Bob's chagrin.
We'll be emailing all the members of our Pro Tester Program later this week, asking everyone to indicate whether they'd be interested in testing the new app. If you're an iPad-owning* Pro member who hasn't already completed their tester profile… well, we'd recommend doing it pretty quickly. :)
We'll be randomly selecting 100 people out of those interested (selection method not yet determined, anyone got an especially large hat?), and inviting this group to start testing the app next week.
If you're interested in updates on the test, please follow us on Twitter or Facebook. We look forward to sharing the app with everyone shortly!
*It's going to be a tad bit difficult to test the app without an iPad, but if you don't have one just yet, not to worry! As long as you'll have an iPad in your hot little hands by early next week, please complete your tester profile.
Update March 31: The 100 testers have now been notified; thanks to everyone who was interested!
Update April 26: Remember The Milk for iPad has been submitted to Apple for approval. Woohoo! :)
Posted in: New Features & Updates
Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Get a refund on price drops
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by Andrew Conkling
This week's tip, shared by mmorowitz, features a novel way to use Remember The Milk to help save money after a large purchase:
I recently purchased a new dishwasher from a local retailer. I asked if they had a price-drop guarantee. They, like many retailers, will guarantee you the lowest price they offer the product at for up to 30 days after your purchase.
I set a RTM reminder for a few days short of the deadline with all the relevant info about my purchase in the notes (invoice number, price, etc.)
When the item came up in my daily list, I checked the price online and it was $25 lower. I called and they happily credited my credit card.
Anytime you make a reasonably large purchase, ask about their price policy and create a reminder and you'll likely save yourself a few bucks.
Thanks for sharing this tip, mmorowitz! 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: Creating a "Quadrant 1" Smart List for your Urgent and Important tasks
Tuesday, March 15, 2011 by Emily Boyd
This week's tip, shared by jbmiv, shows how you can use the power of Smart Lists to create your own "urgent and important" list:
Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" has a concept of a 4 X 4 matrix with urgency/non-urgency on one axis and importance/non-importance on the other.
Quadrant 1 is at the intersection of urgent and important, a.k.a. "firefighting," and while you definitely don't want to spend all your time there, it is key to know what to-dos are in that category and get them knocked out.
I created a simple "Quad1" Smart List whose search filter is simply:
(dueWithin:"1 week" OR dueBefore:"today") AND priority:1
That captures in one short list the intersection of urgent, top-priority things across all my lists.
Getting that list down to nothing lets me move to Quadrant 2, not-urgent but important, a.k.a., "Quality Time," where you want to invest as much of your time as you can.
Thanks for sharing this tip, jbmiv! 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
Support for Japan
Sunday, March 13, 2011 by Omar Kilani
Remember The Milk users from Japan have always been great supporters of our service; the city with by far the most Remember The Milk users in the world is Tokyo (with other cities in Japan not far behind), indicating the level of support we've been fortunate enough to receive.
After Friday's devastating earthquake and tsunami, we wanted to provide support to the people who've supported us.
To do our small part to help, we're donating to relief efforts 100% of this month's revenue (Pro upgrades and renewals) received from Remember The Milk users in Japan.
The hearts and thoughts of the Remember The Milk team go out to those in Japan affected by this tragedy.
(Also posted on our Japanese blog.)
Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Getting movie recommendations from friends
Tuesday, March 8, 2011 by Andrew Conkling
If you forget which movies your friends suggest, this week's tip, shared by gordonswaby, offers a solution for how they can get a recommendation to you that you'll actually watch later. :)
I'm really picky about the movies I watch and I'm highly annoyed when I watch crappy movies–even those with rave reviews are sometimes crappy. Luckily I have cool friends who I share similar movie tastes with. They watch tons of movies and always recommend the good ones to me. Unfortunately I do not always have the opportunity to talk to them or when I do they'll recommend a good movie and I'll forget to watch it or add it to RTM.
Solution? Remember The Milk.
Sure, RTM's awesome share tasks feature would work well for them to share movies with me, but sadly I can't convince some of them to join or even use RTM. But hey, they use email. What I do is create a list. I call mine "Moviesr". I then create an email forwarder to forward all emails with the subject "Moviesr" to my Remember the milk inbox address.
They'll type my email normally, write the subject in their email client as "Moviesr", in the body they'll put the name of the movie and of course the "-end-" and hit send.
BAM! instantly added to my RTM Movies list. I check it weekly for new movie recommendations and then edit the details of any given movie I'm interested in (eg date, priority etc).
Thanks for sharing this tip, gordonswaby! You're our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
If you can't get them to email your Remember The Milk address, you can always forward their email to your address. Read more about our email service on our site.
Also, you can incorporate this tip with a previous one for the ultimate in movie watching awesomeness. :)
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: Developing a good habit
Tuesday, March 1, 2011 by Andrew Conkling
In this week's tip, bazman90 recounts how he used a series of tasks to help him drink more water:
I had a health check in work recently and was told I was only just hydrated enough, so I thought what would help me remember to drink water regularly through the day and not just the essential coffee each morning.
So I created a task called "Drink Water – 200ml" and duplicated it to alert me many times a day, within a given period. I had the first one go off at 9.30am and then every half hour until 3pm. I also set the repeat to 'every day'.
This meant that every day between 9.30 and 3 on half-hourly intervals I was reminded to drink water, helping me towards my 2 litres a day!!
Maybe a bit of over kill, but now when i am sat in the office and an alert on my phone goes off I instinctively drink a swig of water.
I deleted the reminders today, after about three weeks as the routine/habit has been set.
I'm sure this could be applied to other areas too…
Yes, we're very interested in how this method has been used in all sorts of situations; it's a helpful way to encourage yourself to develop all sorts of habits.
Thanks for sharing this tip, bazman90! 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
