How do you spell relief? e-m-p-t-y

I finally convinced my wife today that we should try out rememberthemilk for our TODO items. We're already avid users of gmail and google calendar, and these tools are great for scheduling and basic communication, but there's a class of tasks that don't deserve a calendar spot, and don't really work well in e-mail, that just don't get done.

Along the way it seemed to me that we should probably buy a copy of Getting Things Done although I'm already rather a fan of
7 Habits et al. I also came across a handy PDF outlining how to manage your e-mail - namely keep your inbox empty. So I decided to apply these tools together and transferred my e-mail into rememberthemilk and was surprised - amazed - at the level of relief that created! Wow, there's a real risk here of getting satsified just by organizing the TODOs as opposed to actually doing them. At the same time, it's important to realize and accept that a big and growing inbox is in and of itself a source of stress; a suitable management system like GTD's 43 folders or rememberthemilk may help reduce that, if combined with an active effort to do the things in all those folders or on all those lists.

Certainly it's easier than ever before to get organized with tools that are freely available. As more and more software companies realize that they can make money by providing "free" or "almost free" services in your web browser, they've produced a huge range of choices - good, usable choices - for everything you need - e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, calendars, and TODOs. It's great! Now, I need to focus on actually doing some of those TODOs...