I have finally begun to have continued success with keeping track of my notes, events, tasks, etc with the help of Google Calendar, Notebook, Docs, and Remember The Milk. In the past, I would initially make good progress managing my personal information scraps, but would invariably fall behind in organizing them – but it seems that these tools have finally gotten good (and usable) enough so that I have not fallen behind and have actually felt a better control of my week. This post is just a kudos to them, and possibly some data for those needing to find their way.

My past struggles have been with keeping track of anything beyond what I have been responsible for – mostly concerning the other interesting and cool things that might be worth doing. The problem has been that there are usually way too-many things that I have either wanted to do or things that I have been responsible for, and it has been hard in easily organizing, scheduling, planning or remembering them when I needed to – especially with regards to the ‘optional’ things that could be helpful. After trying a number of tools, from common office applications like Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft OneNote, modifying the code of a todo list managers from CodeGuru, virtual post-it notes from ICQ (yup long back, they don’t have the capability any longer) and 3M, to web-based applications like Tada Lists, I think I have finally settled on a good set of tools.

Nowadays, I use Google Calendar to put all my events. I actually have three-sub calendars: one for each large project that I am involved with (actually times two for optional/non events). Depending on the person I am working with, I share different calendars to different amounts (showing free/busy info or showing all the details), so that people generally have an idea of when they can find me. All my tasks go onto one of my three Remember-the-milk lists, which has great integration with Google Calendar – in fact I turn on both the integration options, I see all my tasks as day long events as well as have the capability to add tasks right within the Calendar interface. I set the Google Calendar coloring for the various calendars and tasks to match up, so that I can get an idea of the items at a quick glance. Finally, I keep my notes in Google Notebook. It provides a just enough amount of flexibility in organization, and at the same time allows reorganizing things well enough for my needs. If any category grows too much, it typically means that I need to pull all the points into a single document, for which Google Docs has been great.

The great thing about having all these tools online has been that I have been very easily able to access the information from anywhere. In particular, I often need to switch from my desktop at work and my laptop when I am on the move. Google has also done a great job with widgets for the personalize Google homepage.

The only thing that I hope for is Google buying out Remember the milk, so that the integration can be polished up a little more, and I do not have to worry about Google themselves adding another set of task management functionality.