To keep sane in a life with study, work and personal stuff, one should remain organized. There are several ways to do so; the most effortless way would be to keep all things in memory. While not everyone is gifted with random access memory in their heads, other tools should be used instead. Think of post-its, a notebook or a calendar. A less common way is to create empty files on your Windows desktop, with a filename describing a task. To keep track of all my tasks I use digital task lists. To be more precise, for almost two years I use Remember The Milk (RTM) and since then I barely forgot about doing something. I use it every single day and my task list is always available thanks to their website and a great Android application. To use the latter to its full potential, you have to become Pro member ($25/year), but I believe it's worth it.

With RTM you can create several lists (Work, Personal, Study, ...) to store your tasks into. So when I'm at work I won't be bothered with my personal or study tasks, I only see those tasks that matter at that time. A task itself has several attributes, among them of course a due date, a priority (1-3) and a description. Furthermore, you can add a time estimation, tags, a location, a URL, notes and a repetition for each task. Especially the last feature is very powerful and I wouldn't want to live without it. For example, the task which reminds me to put the garbage outside repeats every two weeks on a Monday, no need to create the task over and over again. These are "every" repetitions: every monday, every 1st of the month, etc. Another type of repetitions are denoted with "after", which reoccur based on the last time you completed a task. Watering flowers should occur seven days after the last time I did that (repetition rule: "after 7 days"), so these are recreated each time I complete that task.

These lists grow and grow and may become overwhelming. Fortunately, RTM provides very powerful search functionality to find only those tasks which matter to you at a certain time. For example: you can list all tasks which are due within this week by entering dueBefore:"1 week". You can save these lists (called "Smart Lists"), which are automatically updated whenever tasks get added or changed. As you will see later on, these queries may become very complex using a wide range of keywords and logical operators (AND, OR, NOT). I use these to overcome one shortcoming in RTM, namely that tasks have no start date. I prefer to hide tasks which don't matter to me at this moment, keeping the list shorter and to-the-point. I mean, I can't be bothered now with putting the garbage outside when they collect it next week.

The trick to hide these kind of tasks is described here. Using tasks, I can put some tasks to "sleep" and "wake" them when they should be on the list. I add the following tags to my tasks to give them certain properties:

After you have labeled your tasks as such, it's time to compose a search query which does the opposite thing. When a task is tagged with z1w (one week), but the task's due date is still two weeks into the future, we show it. The following query takes care of this, using the various operators which RTM offers:

This may look pretty daunting, but in fact the query consists of five separate parts separated by OR, one taking care of each tag. So you just made a beautiful list of useless tasks which you don't want to see today. Save it (look at the right), because only then we can turn this list in something useful. Now you can refer to this list's contents in other search queries to specify what you don't want to see. For example, to show all my tasks on my Personal list but not on my "sleep" list I enter the following query:

And you'll see, only your relevant tasks will appear.

If you understand how to exploit these powerful search queries, the possibilities are endless. I built a few useful lists which I consult all the time, rather than my "real" lists. My default list shows the tasks for the upcoming week and is defined by the following query:

This query has three main parts, separated by ANDs. The first part tells from which lists the tasks should be shown. On this list I would only like to see personal tasks and study related tasks, and in some cases work related tasks when they have to be performed at home. The second part filters on its date: only show tasks which are overdue, or tasks which are due within 1 week from today. The last component looks familiar: get rid of all tasks which I don't need to see right now.

RTM also has excellent mobile applications, so you can access your task lists anywhere. Even better, these devices are typically location aware, which we can exploit to hide tasks based on location. I created the query below which I can always see on the home screen of my phone:

A great deal of the query looks similar to the previous one. Since the screen area of my phone is much more limited compared to my PC, this filter has some stricter filters. I tend to have quite a few overdue tasks (yes, I'm a lazy bum), therefore I don't like to have these tasks to be at the top of my list all the time. Instead, the red part makes sure that overdue tasks from yesterday only are shown, or older tasks when they have the highest priority. Actually I was looking for overdue tasks until 3 days ago, but RTM doesn't allow arbitrary intervals for dueBefore, except "today" and "yesterday" [1]. The green part makes sure that all tasks which are bound to a location are hidden as long as I'm not there. Either it shows tasks which have no location, or only tasks which are to be performed nearby. In theory, the list on my home screen should update automatically when I move to several places. But unfortunately, there's a bug somewhere which prevents the app from doing that, at least on my phone (HTC Desire with Android 2.2). This is being investigated as I write this, so perhaps it will be fixed soon.

As you can see, RTM is a very decent task manager and miles ahead of its competitors. You can create several lists or create dynamic lists based on a simple or a very complex search query. Thanks to their excellent mobile apps there is no excuse anymore to forget the milk at the supermarket.