The amount of stuff you accumulate and have to remember when you’re planning your wedding is crazy. I felt completely overwhelmed by the amount of ideas, information and handouts I had to not only keep but easily refer to during the whole planning process.
Because I’m a total geek, I ended up using a lot of technology to keep myself sane and organized. I also realized that all these tools vastly cut down on the amount of paper and various other products I would have needed. So without even thinking about it, I was going green and getting more organized.
My favorite tools:
ReQall, Remember the Milk, Google Calendars, Gmail, Iphone, Google Reader and my Scan Snap.
Today I’ll talk about two: ReQall and Remember The Milk.
ReQall:
I have several learning disabilities and have a really hard time remembering things. So if I need to remember something, it HAS to be written down for me to refer to later. So whenever I have a task or info I need to remember, I simply speak into my iphone and ReQall takes my voice and translates it into text (really really accurately). So I can quickly see a list of things I need to remember, all written down, at the end of the day. A lot of people use pen and paper for this- it’s so simple! However, I find I remember things at times when paper and pen are not a viable option. When I’m driving, standing in line, before class…etc It just never worked for me. But ReQall is always there because I always have my phone. I actually even set ReQall up so that when I do speak into the phone to record a to-do, it automatically forwards it to my Remember The Milk inbox of to-dos. I love that! You can even set up ReQall on your partner’s phone and they can send you to-dos (I can sense the enthusiasm, but after Natalie telling me ‘Call the florist’ 400 times and not remembering, her simply sending me a to-do makes my life easier).
Remember The Milk:
There are a million to-do list programs out there. Really. I have tried at least 25 programs. It’s sick. But I’m lazy and the amount of work most to-do programs make you do to ‘get organized’ makes me hate them. I need something that is easy and smart and flexible. And Remember The Milk does that for me. I can’t stand the idea that at the end of the day I need to go back through my to-do list and put them in categories and organize it. UGH. So I set it up so that all my ‘lists’ in Remember The Milk are actually smart lists. I set it up so that when I put in a new to-do, I have a few keywords that automatically put that to-do in the right list. So if I have to email all the bloggers about something coming up for So You’re EnGAYged, I have a list set up so that if I type SYE in the to-do, it automatically moves that to-do to my So You’re EnGAYged to-do list. This is one of the simplest and yet most life-changing things about Remember The Milk. It has tons of other options, but I’m just starting to explore them.
So while I was planning my wedding I had a list for every vendor, a ceremony list, reception list, decor/diy list and a personal list (for *gasp* non wedding crap I had to get done). So if I needed to find fabric for my chuppah, I would write:
“Go to Joanne’s Fabric Store for Chuppah Fabric CEREM” CEREM was my keyword for that to-do to automatically be transfer to my Ceremony List. You can also add tags, locations, and all kinds of stuff. But this is the basics of Remember The Milk.
Other people have used Remember the Milk for their wedding too. Read over here.
How did you get Reqall to send to do’s to Remember the Milk?
Set up reqall to automatically send emails to you. Then, if your using gmail, you can set up a filter to automatically forward reqall emails to your remember the milk inbox address (go to your remember the milk settings info tab to find out what it is). Then reqall voice to text transcripts will automatically appear in your remember the milk inbox.
Awesome full tutorial here:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/4594/how-to-use-reqall-and-gmail-to-create-the-ultimate-reminder-service/
I use a spreadsheet in google docs and the DoBot ToDos app on the iphone. Neither one of them are particulary snazzy, but I just need a way to jot something down before it passes out of my head.
I used Remember the Milk for a minute, but currently I am obsessed with both Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) and Nozbe (http://www.nozbe.com/a-B069CCB9).