Because it's been a while since I blogged about productivity tools

For the last few weeks I have been using a great online "to do" list application, Remember The Milk. The more I use it, the more I like it.

In my opinion, its best features are the following:

It talks to Google products. You can integrate it with Google Calendar, or (my personal favourite), with Gmail. In Gmail your to-do list then becomes a right-hand column, so that someone like me who checks their email obsessively has no excuse for forgetting the tasks for the day.

It is super easy to add tasks. You can do it from within your Gmail account, from within Google Calendar, by sending the program an email, or on the Remember The Milk site. Minimally, it involves one click and typing in the name of the task. (You can add much more info about the task if you wish, though, including priority, due date, location, etc.)

The application is smart. For due date, for example, you can type "today", "tomorrow", "Wednesday", "1 Jan", "Jan first", etc, and it recognises all of these and converts them to its standard formats. If you are adding a task from within your email account, and include the name of one of your contacts (e.g. "call Richard"), it uses your email address book to auto-complete.

It probably has many more features I haven't explored yet, but one of the things I like about it is that you can get started straight away using a very minimal subset of what it can do, all of which is totally intuitive, and only begin using the more advanced settings and features if and when you find them helpful.