How to use Remember The Milk to plan the tasks of a simple project

[This is part 2 in our little spare-time project series. See part one for some context.]

OK, so we are set with a MindMap of the big picture and overall plan for MFSP - my fancy spare time project. All set. All well. All fine. All not done, yet. And this is where Remember the Milk (RTM) comes in. This is a plain and simple online todo-list manager. And the best thing about it is that is not only useful for not forgetting about the milk but caring about one's spare-time project's tasks as well.

But how does it fit our MFSP task planning? As plain and simple as it gets, of course: by using some tags and two saved searches to dig everything up on demand.

Do this by going through the Releases node of your MFSP MindMap and looking at every single feature mentioned therein. Take the feature and think about what it is that needs to be done in order to get the feature all round and shiny. This is your planning session and what you do with all your hard thinking is to spend the following three tags on everything you come up with:

• .mfsp: This is a general tag applied to everything related to our fancy project. Especially helpful for those of us who use RTM for more than just this one project.


• v1.2: A version tag that directly correlates with one of the Releases sub-nodes in our MindMap. It is applied to everything that will eventually make it into some release of the application. The numbers change from planned version to planned version, of course.


• na: This is just an abbreviation for next action. Use it to tag everything that you plan to do next on every feature of a planned release. Don't forget to add this tag to another task when you cross off the current one as done.

In addition you have the following two searches defined once and for all:

• Current Release: tag:.mfsp and tag:na and status:incomplete and v1.2


• Next Actions: (status:incomplete and tag:na) or dueBefore:today or due:today

Save these searches, do some RTM clean up as recommended at Paprika Lab's RTM for GTD post, and you get the following plain and simple navigation bar to guide you through your project's tasks:



Plain. Simple. And easy! But just in case this still looks too overkill: let's see if we can find an even simpler approach in the next part of this little spare-time project series.