I know a lot of people who read a load of productivity blogs, but they aren’t really productive, and organized. They want to be, but they start out with a method they read about, fail with it, and move on to the next. While it is obviously not a good idea to change methods after an initial failure, the real reason for the many long faces I see regarding all the productivity tips out there is not this.

The real reason behind people not being able to force productivity on themselves is much-much deeper. For this I will need to go deep into what I think productivity is and how you can achieve it. Read on to see what I think about the whole issue in general, and how you can learn to be more efficient and productive on your own (am I cutting out my own audience here? Oh well, as long as you become productive!)

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One of the best features in Remember the Milk is the smart list, which is essentially a search option, but your searches can be saved permanently. Normally you would want to save a search because you perform them often, but in Remember the Milk there are more benefits.

I actually only have one “real” list in RTM, the others are all smart lists. So I have loads of tasks, all in one list, but tagged well. This means that if I search for “tag: blog”, it will show me all my blog related tasks. If I save that search, I now have a new list, with every item tagged with blog. The productivity aspect enters right here, because you aren’t limited to just viewing, you can edit and create tasks inside the smart list.

This means that if you create a task, it will automatically be tagged with “blog”, and of course it will be created in your primary list. This feature is great if you do some more complex searches, like incomplete priority 1 tasks, tagged with “blog” and due tomorrow. These are you most important tasks probably, so you may want to keep an eye on them. You can either type “priority:1 and status:incomplete and tag:blog and dueWithin:”1 of today”" in the search field, or you can use the search options too. When you save this as a smart list and create a new task, it will automatically be assigned all these attributes. This saves you time, increasing your productivity because there is no need to tag all your tasks.

I recommend having only 1, maybe two main lists, and creating all your other lists from them using smart lists. This makes sense from a GTD and productivity view, possibly even database management view because it eliminates redundancy, and auto-creates what you need. I also find that sometimes it’s useful to see all your tasks, regardless of their properties in one place.

I have definitely said before that Remember the milk is my all time favorite web 2.0 app. It’s a really flexible to-do list, it can be used for GTD purposes quite well, and can organize you and make you more productive in the blink of an eye.

They have just released a feature for the new Gmail that is just so cool. If you’ve used Outlook you probably know that when you flag an email it creates a task for you. You can then sort and edit these tasks. The same functionality has been added to Gmail with the help of RTM and it works very well. You can choose to activate email task addition by staring email, or adding a specific label. You can also add tasks as you would normally, editing them right there in Gmail.

The best feature is that you can edit all the details like tags and URL and so on right there and not have to go back and forth between the RTM website and Gmail. I would enjoy the option to add notes there too and I also miss the tag suggestion feature which made adding tags easy and error free for me.

All-in-all I recommend you try it out, you will need the new Gmail and Firefox 2.0 or higher. It makes managing tasks and emails in one place really easy, it’s actually the only organization method like this I’ve seen working online.

Read all about it on the Remember the milk blog