Welcome to part 2 in the Remember the Milk series. If you would like to follow this series from the beginning please feel free and start here.

Rmilk (Remember the Milk) is a free service to help you create to do lists. Rmilk has some great features and one feature that makes Rmilk great is Smart Add. This tutorial will teach you the basics of Smart Add so you can enter your tasks that much faster and easier.

In part 1 of this series we learned how to add our tasks into the above highlighted field and then edit the task after entering it. Today we will be talking about how you can type one key to change the Due Date, Change Priority,  Add to a List & Add Tags, Repeat the Task, Time Estimate, Add Tags, Add a Location, and Attach a URL. Now I will show you how to add all of those with just typing a special sign for each.

Due Date

After you enter your task you can type the “^” symbol and you will get a drop down menu. You can select a day or just enter a date and that will add a due date to your task.

Change the Priority

If you type an “!” you will get a drop down menu to change the priority of your task. 1 being highest priority and 3 being lowest.

Add to a List & Add Tags

You can type a “#” sign and get a drop down list with your Lists. You can choose the list you want to add your task to. You may only chose one list. If you type another “#” sign then you can add a tag. You can add multiple tags by just continuing to add “#” signs.

Repeat the Task

You can get a drop down menu to make your task repeat by typing “*”. You can choose daily, biweekly, etc.

Time Estimate

You can choose a time estimate from a drop down if you type an “=” sign. You can also type a time estimate right after the sign if it is not in the list.

Add URL

To add a URL to your task is simple. Just type the address and it will be added to the URL field on the task. You want to type the full URL including the http://www to have it be placed correctly.

Conclusion

You can type any of these symbols in any order to edit your task. Once you hit the add button it is all set. But if you need to change anything you can edit it the same as usual.

Please stay tuned for part 3  where I will go over some of the Special Features of RMilk:

• How to add your to do list to Gmail
• Sync tasks with Google Calendar
• Learn about the Twitter app

As part of getting ready for the holiday season I am trying to get more organized. I got my calendar set up and ready to start adding parties and events as they come up in the holidays. Now I am working on my to do lists.

Remember the Milk is one of my favorite tools to help me with my to do lists. RMilk (Remember the Milk) is a free service to help you create to do lists. Some of the great features of RMilk are Syncing with Google Calendar, you can access it offline, you can use it on your iPhone or Blackberry, it can be used with Twitter, you can add it to your gmail account, you can email your tasks to your list, you can share your tasks with others… I could keep going but let’s start seeing how to get started using Rmilk.

Creating Your Lists

You will want to start by making your lists. (The Inbox and Sent Lists are defaults you use for some of the more advance features.) To add lists click “Settings”, click the “List” tab and above your current lists you will have a bright blue button that says “+ Add List”.

These are my lists I have created:

• Boyz
• Christmas (my to dos and present list)
• Church
• Home (things that need to be done around the house)
• Meals (Meal planning things, grocery shopping, etc.)
• Online (Posts I want to write and when)
• Personal
• Work (this is archived)

You can archive a list if you are not using it at the moment. I have “work” in my archives because I only work part-time now. I just pulled my Christmas List out of the archives this last week. You can archive and unarchive your lists in this same settings section. You can make as many lists as you want.

Adding Your Tasks

Now that you have created your lists you can now start adding your tasks. You can make your tasks as simple or detailed as you want. On RMilk part 2 I will go over a special feature called “Smart Add” which makes adding your tasks even faster and more advanced.

Adding tasks is simple type in your task and hit enter. It will show up in your list. Pretty easy. You can sort your list by priority, due date, or alphabetically. Now for the fun part, using some of those great features.

Editing your Tasks

If you click on the checkbox next to the task you will get a menu to the right. In this menu you can change many things about your task.

To change the name of the task click on the little pencil.

You can change when your task is due. One nice feature of this is you can type in the date, tomorrow, or Friday and it will automatically find the date for you.

You can set how often the task repeats. If you always go shopping on Thursdays you can make sure that it will be on your list every Thursday. In this field you can write it however you need also like daily, biweekly, yearly, after 1 day, etc.

You can also put in how long you think this task will take you so you can make sure you don’t overbook yourself.

You can Tag your task just like you tag your blog entries. That way if you need to do a search on everything that deals “food” your tags will pull those items for you.

You can enter a location for your task. This doesn’t have to be an address, this could be in your kitchen, the library, at home, etc.

You can connect a URL to the task also. Which is great for putting in URLs for recipes, crafts you want to do at a party, or a meme you want to participate in.

You can also see how many times you have postponed a task, who you have shared it with and if there are any notes.

If you click the top tab that says notes you can write yourself a note about the task. Maybe a place to write a grocery list or a list of participants, lots of possibilities.

Please stay tuned for part 2 and part 3  where I will go over some of the Special Features of RMilk:

• How to add your to do list to Gmail
• Sync tasks with Google Calendar
• Learn about the Twitter app
• How to Smart Add

This post is linked to WFMW.

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