I use Remember the Milk, but I never use it to remember the milk.

Ironic.

Here’s why. I’m not a terribly good GTD-aholic. I am forever thankful to the day I absorbed the GTD principle of “don’t worry about stuff before you have to”, i.e. I schedule in tasks in RTM for the day I have to think about them and then forget completely. It’s fantastic. However, I still keep some pretty terrible habits kicking around: one of them is what my mum used to call “the big shelf”. I think visually, so it doesn’t matter if everything’s in heaps on the floor, as long as I remember which things are in which heap, I’m fine.

This pops up in RTM as todo-list-laziness. I have one list. “Inbox”. It contains all my tasks. This is partly exacerbated by the fact I mostly use RTM via the Gmail gadget which gives me no incentive to use multiple lists. But who cares. It’s fine as it is.

Until I want to make a shopping list, and my current system totally and utterly breaks. I can’t add shopping list items as individual tasks, so to speak; my system gets overcluttered and, since I’m date-driven, I basically have to add nonsensical tasks like “milk today” “eggs today”. Even if I created them in a new list that’d still be the case, though at least then I’d have some separation from actual to-dos. The only solution I can see within RTM, specifically date-driven RTM use, is to add a “Sainsbury’s” task and add my shopping list as a note. Makes it hard to see at a glance what I’ve got to buy, hard to note down suddenly-remembered items, etc.

Good thing I’m a paper junkie, really. It just struck me as extremely amusing that I can’t use an app called Remember the Milk to do just that.