The one everyone seems to bang on about is Getting Things Done, or GTD, but while I may be terribly mistaken that does seem like learning to run before I can crawl. This probably means I’m exactly the sort of person who should put aside a few days to get my GTD in situ but I fear I’ll just not keep it going. What I need is something that fits into my current somewhat random way of working and tidies it up a bit.

Remember The Milk was recommended to me last week by Chris due to its Twitter integration. I use Twitter a lot so it makes sense to have a system that hooks into that, so I signed up. Being Twitter-centric it’s a fairly simple thing – send “d rtm Do That Thing Monday” to Twitter and “Do That Thing” is entered into my Remember The Milk account with a due date of Monday. There are a bunch load of other commands I can send but they’re not essential. What matters is when I think of a thing I need to do I can add it to the list in the same ways I update Twitter, either on my computer or on my phone.

So far it’s like any number of other reminder services, but the killer feature here is the Gmail integration. I use the Gmail web interface all the time having moved over from Apple Mail last year so it’s essentially my desktop. Remember The Milk has a Firefox plugin that slots your to-do list alongside your inbox as if it were part of Gmail itself. It looks like this:

(Taken from the RTM site)

What this means is every time I check my email my todo list is right there in front of me. I cannot ignore it as I do with paper-based lists and pin board, nor can I just never load it up as I do with computer-based lists. It’s always there. So far it’s working and hopefully it’ll get me in the habit of actually doing stuff when it’s supposed to be done and then I can move onto to a proper GTD system.

But what’s interesting here is I never have to visit the RTM site itself. I can add things in Twitter or Gmail and tick them off in Gmail, yet everything is going through the RTM server. This kind of seamless integration is really what “Web 2.0″ is about yet if I’m never going to the RTM website ho can they make money from me? The “Pro” upgrade is aimed at mobile users and I’m not sure I need to review stuff while mobile considering I can submit stuff by text to Twitter, but I can see this being a critical part of their offering. $25 a year isn’t much really, though, so if I manage to keep using this for a fortnight I’ll probably stump up the cash. Actually I notice the iPhone service has a 15 day trial so there you go. But meanwhile I can see me never going to the RTM site itself, just using the services that patch into it. This is how the internet should work.

Shame about the stupid name though, but what can do you do? ;)