After months of listening to my iPhone-enabled hubby rave about Remember the Milk, I finally got around to giving it a try today. I invited some of my advanced clients along for the fun, and we are in collective awe.

For years I have said that any good task manager must be portable. This has posed a real challenge for our clients who love using Outlook Tasks but carry handheld devices which are not as Task-savvy as Outlook. (Note – all my praise for Outlook Tasks is reserved for the OL 2003 Task Pad. 2007’s To-do Bar has taken us backwards.)

But I digress…back to the problem with Outlook and portable tasks. All the time and energy people spent configuring the Task Pad at the desktop was completely lost in a sea of All Tasks on the handhelds. The Palm OS used to do a pretty good job of acting like Outlook, but that’s all over now.

The other problem arises when Outlook users are out and about, wanting to put a Task on the list but limited by the weak or non-existent task creation capabilities of their particular handheld devices.

Thus it would seem that to get our tasks to behave consistently between the desktop and handheld, we’re going to have to look for organised-task-sync solutions in the cloud.

The good news is that the folks at Remember the Milk are doing a great job of exactly this…and the Pro version with Milk Sync plays nicely with Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices so that we can stay organised and focused on the road. Naturally,  iPhone users get their own app, and Milk’s integration with Gmail and Google Calendar is heading in the right direction for Firefox users.  Google Gears means we can use Milk even when we’re offline.

Good googley golly – this could actually be the full package, at long last.

I could go on forever about email and SMS reminders, locations (spooky), tags, notes, smartlists, and all the other workflow-friendly features of Remember the Milk, but we’ll save that for another time and place.

As usual, my better half was right; Milk does indeed look like Task Nirvana. Watch this space.

Filed under: Focus, Tasks | 2 Comments »