Where’s the peanut butter?!

Sigur Ros might be over-hyped and super stylized and everything but they’re also totally incredible.

RememberTheMilk (RTM) is a great web service. It’s a free, moderately simple, and feature rich task management system (and there was a more extended review recently on lifehacker). That’s not super impressive - most people who care about keeping track of tasks electronically already do so one way or another. What makes it really nice are its centralization and its notification integration features.

The centralization aspect is pretty key.  I’ve kept track of to-do lists for years using outlook and PocketPC tasks, using emacs’ planner mode, and more recently I’ve been ditching most of that complexity and just using the simple task manager on my Nokia phone. All of those meant I was tethered to a specific device (a specific phone) or technology (a computer) and usually meant I needed to initiate a sync to keep everything in line.

RTM breaks a bunch of that since I can keep all my tasks organized on a simple web site and lets me categorize them as much as I want. They offer a simple web interface for mobile access in case I need to see more than “what’s due immediately” and this works on my nokia phone or any computer.

But the awesome part is the twitter integration.  Sign up for both twitter and RTM, tell RTM who you are on twitter, and then “follow rtm” and now you can interact with your RTM account through twitter.  They have a pretty full-featured looking interface but the only things I care about are being able to send a direct message to rtm on twitter like “d rtm Find out who sings the song during the Maggie Gyllenhaal segment of Paris je t’aime” and now I have that todo in my task list. And if I organize my tasks on the web site and set a due time, RTM will send me a message via twitter reminding me of that due date.

RTM seems to have a ton of other collaboration features for sharing and publishing tasks (or printing weekly “To Do” lists) that I haven’t really tried. The simple features are enough for me right now to feel it’s going to make me more productive and better organized with less complexity.