I’ve tried various way over the years of making sure I completed my every day tasks. I’ve tried emailing myself todo items, I’ve kept task lists in a txt file, excel file, MS Outlook tasks, and I frequently stuck post-it notes in my eyeglass case so when I get home and went for my glasses I’d get my reminder. Overall, the combination of excel and email reminders worked the best for me, but I never really succeeded.
So I was looking for a savior. And that’s when I came across RememberTheMilk (RTM) - a web based task management application.
With RTM I’m now able to manage multiple task lists (home, work, gifts, etc) in one location on the web. I get email reminders, instant messenger reminders, and sms reminders. No more post-it-note in the eye glass case tricks are needed. RTM is my virtual sticky-note, that allows me to stay up to date with all my tasks from wherever I am.The website itself is a sexy application featuring a nice, clean design with plenty of helpful AJAX features that makes getting your work done faster and easier.
RTM is available in 12 different languages. For those of you embedded in your RSS reader - you can receive your tasks via RSS or ATOM. You can even email your tasks to your RTM email address (they create one for you when you sign up) and it will then be added to your task list. Actually, there are so many features you just need to check them out for yourself.
So, as you can see, thing one thing RTM is not is just another todo list web application. Based out of Sydney, Australia, the two member team of RTM, and their mascot monkey Bob, were kind enough to answer some of our questions…
Let’s start by getting to know everyone at RememberTheMilk(RTM): name, role at RTM, foot size, hair color, and when I sleep at night I dream about…?
Name: Emily Boyd (EB)
Role: Designer
Foot size: 7
Hair color: Brown
When I sleep at night I dream about: Answering Remember The Milk support emails (seriously). If only they were done when I woke up…
Name: Omar Kilani (OK)
Role: Software Engineer
Foot size: 11
Hair color: Brown
When I sleep at night I dream about: Tasks — lots of them. Coding new functionality. Optimizing various bits and pieces.
We recently interviewed another startup (Reddit Interview - Social news bookmarking never looked so easy.) that is comprised of a relatively small team (4 people). RTM is a team of two. Describe the various responsibilities you each share.
EB: I design the UI and decide how everything works, code most of the HTML and CSS behind the site (with many hours of fun solving browser-specific CSS issues), write content, and manage pretty much all communication with users and the outside world.
OK: I basically take Emily’s UI/UX ideas and try to make them a reality — which usually means doing tricky things with JavaScript. I like to architect scalable and efficient systems — which usually means writing a lot of code in many different languages and obsessing about performance. I’m also the systems admin, network admin, and various related roles.
What are some of the obstacles you face by only being a team of 2?
EB: It’s a lot of work for two people! Sometimes it can be difficult to strike a balance between providing support for our users (good support is really important to us) and having the time to develop new and innovative features.
What are the benefits?
EB: We can develop rapidly without meetings getting in the way — while sometimes we think it would be helpful to have more people working on RTM, we think we manage pretty well as a team of two.
Where is the RTM based out of? How do you feel about the location in relation to starting a fairly new business and working with other people in the web community (positives and negatives)?
EB: We’re in Sydney, Australia. The time difference isn’t ideal (with many of our users located in North America and Europe), but we tend to be night owls anyway, so it’s not too much of an issue. We’re obviously quite a distance from most of the web community, which makes it difficult for us to interact with other people — but on the other hand, it allows us to really focus on what we’re doing without too many distractions 
For a web application that took one year to build, RTM was first introduced to the world in beta status. What will it take for RTM to come out of “beta” status?
EB: It’s now been two years since we started building RTM, and we’re still not done! We have a vision of where we’d like to take RTM, and we’re not quite there yet — I imagine we’ll look at coming out of beta once we’re closer to that.
More and more we’re starting to see office mascots featured on company websites. Yours is a stuffed monkey named Bob T. Monkey. So we have to ask: Name? Height? Eye color? Place of birth? Age?
Name: Bob T. Monkey (BTM) Height: Around 8 inches
Eye color: Brown
Place of birth: China via Massachusetts (Emily met Bob while she was in college)
Age: 2yrs old
How did you two meet? And how/where was the idea of creating RTM conceptualized?
EB: We met while we were both (briefly!) attending university in Sydney — we ended up working on an assignment together for a Computer Science class. We came up with the idea for RTM in a conversation in early 2004 — I’m a tasks freak and had developed my own task management web app for personal use a couple of years earlier, and had some ideas for a new tasks app.
What is RTM’s mission and when will you have succeeded?
EB: To help the world be more organised and productive — I don’t think we could define a single point at which we’d be able to say “we’ve succeeded”, but hopefully we’ve succeeded to a degree already
Let’s talk about comment you make in your About section on your website… “We began work on Remember The Milk in August 2004. What started as a simple idea soon became a huge web application with every feature imaginable”. I’d agree, at first consideration the idea of a ToDo list web application would be rather, well…simple. In fact, I believe some criticism RTM faces is that it’s “overloaded” with features for what should be a simple feature limited ToDo list management app. Indeed, RTM is a huge web application. I believe its much more than just a todo list application. It also has an amazingly clean UI, and there’s a lot under that hood (view features). You guys wrote a great HELP section (http://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/) to help users better familiarize themselves with all the available functionality. Even though RTM is actually really simple to use - the argument would be though, with something so large for an idea so simple, why spend my time with RTM and not use something much more simple like 37Signals’ tadalist — please discuss.
EB: Firstly, we think that people should feel free to choose whatever system works for them — whether that’s a paper to-do list, emailing themselves, or writing on the back of their hand. We’re aiming to provide the best way to manage tasks online, with the features that we think help people to organise their lives.
The great thing about RTM is that it’s flexible enough so that it can be used as anything from a simple list to a full-blown task management system. Many people who start out using RTM for simple lists discover that the features are there to help them — you might not need all the features to begin with, but they’re there when you need them.
RTM is heavy on its use of AJAX and DHTML. And I’d have to say, some people abuse the use of ajax simply for saying - “our web app is using ajax” - but RTM makes practical use of AJAX that benefits the user. When/How did you realize AJAX was a technology that should be used throughout RTM? And how is AJAX used incorrectly in today’s web?
EB: We think that Gmail and Google Maps are some of the best examples of AJAX applications, and seeing AJAX applied to email inspired us to do a similar thing with tasks. Using any technology simply for the sake of using that technology is never a good idea — whether it’s AJAX or Flash or anything else.
At the end of August, Emily will be giving a talk about creating rich AJAX interfaces for web-based applications at web directions, and her experiences designing RTM. Let’s talk briefly about those experiences building a heavy AJAX web app. What were some lessons learned and how would you do things differently?
EB: AJAX used correctly can really help to enhance the user experience — but creating an app that provides good interaction isn’t easy. We learnt that developing the most natural interaction takes a lot of thought as well as code (140,000 lines and counting). If we were building RTM now, we’d definitely take a look at some of the libraries and toolkits that are around now (such as the Yahoo! User Interface Library) that unfortunately weren’t available when we started building the site — it’s always good to avoid reinventing the wheel.
Has the use of ajax alienated many of your users?
EB: Not too many, we hope! I think that most of our users are very comfortable using AJAX applications (for example, we receive many emails from users who are using Gmail).
With all the ajax requirements on the browser compatibility issues, I’m wondering, what are the browser stats for those users using RTM?
EB: We aim to support all browsers — we support both IE and Firefox (of course), and we also have full support for Safari and Opera. It’s a lot of work to provide this support (we have to do a lot of testing!), but we have many Safari and Opera users who really appreciate the effort.
Like Gmail, we were prepared to develop a basic HTML version for older browsers, but nobody’s ever really asked for that. We now have a mobile version that provides access to the full functionality of RTM from most browsers.
One piece of functionality I really love - I’m able to easily manage my todo lists solely using my keyboard. I also love the ability to print my lists out in easily readable format. Anyway, Who’s idea was it to integrate all the keyboard functionality and emulate the desktop app user experience, can we expect more “desktop” application features like drag and drop?
EB: We wanted users to be able to interact with the app as quickly and easily as possible — so keyboard shortcuts definitely made sense for that. We find that RTM provides a good balance between web and desktop style features — we include desktop functionality where we feel it would enhance a web app (not every desktop feature works well on the web).
How are new pieces of functionality introduced into the web application? Where do the new functionality ideas come from and how long does it take (on average) to integrate into the core?
EB: Some ideas are from our users, others are from our own brainstorming. We try to provide a lot of functionality without complicating the interface (we’ve added tagging, searching, Smart Lists, mobile version, etc). It’s important to us that while RTM is packed with features, it’s still easy and intuitive to use.
It can take anywhere from days to months for us to develop and integrate new features — we have some pretty cool stuff coming up that we’ve been working on for a few months, so we’re really excited about that.
You seem to have a very active user community in your forums. Do you communicate with your users frequently, and what’s your favorite piece of functionality that has been the outcome of a user feature request?
EB: Yes, we’re communicating with our users all the time, both on the forums and via email. One of our favourite things to come out of users requests is Smart Lists. We found that we were getting a lot of requests for different ways to filters list — one user might want to see all their tasks at once, while another might only want to see their high priority tasks. We came up with the Smart List concept — similar to smart playlists in iTunes, users can create special lists that are based on criteria they define, and automatically updated as their tasks change.
Do you actively use RTM for your own task management?
EB: Yes, every day.
Will time management (features like auditing how much time was estimated and how much time was actually spend on a task) become integrated?
EB: You never know what kind of features we’ll come up with the in the future. We tend not to develop features that we feel are better suited to project management systems (RTM is more for personal task management), but external developers are always free to use our API for non-commercial purposes to provide extended functionality for RTM.
Right now there’s no advertising on RTM. Which begs the questions, how does RTM generate revenue? Are there any plans to either introduce advertisements on the site or start charging for user memberships?
EB: We’re mostly focused on building our application and user base currently. Our users are extremely valuable to us — we’ll be putting them first in whatever we do in the future. We have no plans to charge for RTM — we’d like as many people as possible to be able to use it.
How many users does RTM have? How many of those users actively use RTM (meaning access RTM on a daily basis)?
EB: Bob’s lost count…
How many new users are you gaining on a weekly basis?
EB: We knew we shouldn’t have trusted a monkey to keep track of those numbers!
I’ve read some discussion on your site related to Getting Things Done (GTD) (GTD on wikipedia and Wired’ GTD article). Were you familiar with GTD before creating RTM and do you see any of the concepts behind GTD finding their way into how you think about building RTM today and in the future?
EB: We’ve actually never read the book (too busy working on RTM, I guess!). We’ve made RTM as flexible as possible so that it can be used with any task/time management methodology — we don’t want to force people into a particular way of thinking. GTD seems pretty popular with RTM users, which is great, but we don’t have any plans to integrate specific GTD functionality into our service.
If you could kill the term web 2.0, would you and if so then how would you do it?
EB: We’d kill AJAX first, the rest would follow 
Can we expect any new products outside of RTM from your team?
EB: You never know… RTM is keeping us busy enough for now!
Have any VCs expressed any interest in working with RTM? Is accepting VC something RTM will consider?
EB: Bob evaluates all opportunities for us.
What is RTM listening to these days?
EB: Dixie Chicks.
OK: Bic Runga, Aimee Mann.
BTM: I’m not that into music, most bands don’t cater to the stuffed monkey audience.
Is RTM your full daytime job? Either way, if you weren’t working on RTM what would you be doing?
EB: Yes (and full night-time job too!). I was attending college in the US before leaving to work on RTM, so I’d probably still be doing that.
OK: For 4 out of 7 days and 7 out of 7 nights, yes. The rest of my days are spent working part-time in IT. I’d resume/give more time to my previous open source projects and some new ideas I’ve been toying with (such as ‘the one true language’).
BTM: Yes. If it wasn’t RTM, I’m sure another web 2.0 company would require my services — I’m very in demand. (Know any other stuffed monkeys who’ve written 25,000 lines of JavaScript? I didn’t think so.)
What is a wombat? Please provide your artistic representation of what a wombat is. (use whatever graphic program you wish)
EB: This is Bob’s artistic representation of a wombat. (We might need to take Bob outside so he can actually see a wombat after this.)
Where do you see RTM five years from now?
EB: Hopefully we’ll have telepathic RTM by that stage — we’ve already got Bob working on it.
Before RTM you made your TODO lists using … ?
EB: Notepad. Many people use simple text files because it’s a fast and easy way to manage tasks. We set out to create a user experience with RTM that was just as fast and easy to use — with the addition of functionality that you really can’t get out of a text file like reminders, repeating tasks, advanced filtering, and mobile access.
OK: I was never much of a to-do list person — I’d usually email myself things I need to remember or put things into random text files lying about my $HOME. Now I can email RTM and get reminded when I need to be, and I don’t have to worry about losing those text files.
What sites (besides RTM) must you use every day?
EB: Gmail, Digg, Sydney Morning Herald, and I subscribe to around 100 blogs.
OK: Gmail, Digg, Linux Weekly News, OSNews, reddit for my daily dose of ‘Lisp! No, Smalltalk!’ posts, and freshmeat.
What are the best sites/blog we don’t know about?
EB: We don’t spend a lot of time browsing the web, so I’m not sure we can list anything that hasn’t already been on reddit, del.icio.us, or Digg
Thanks again everyone (Emily, Omar and Bob) for taking time out to answer our questions!
