Controlling Remember the Milk with your Voice

Of all the online tools and gadgets to appear during the past decade, the TODO list manager is my favorite. I used to have difficulty remembering specific tasks but after writing everything down I tend to miss far fewer beats. Having tasks in an online form means your notes are with you wherever you go. A good task manager can help you reduce clutter and achieve zero inbox by getting tasks out of your email and into a scheduled, organized list. A great task manager can make you stop procrastinating altogether.

I’ve tried a number of task managers but ultimately decided on Remember the Milk (RTM). The interface hasn’t changed much over the years, the natural language processing (“Get licorice tomorrow at the grocery store”) via Smart Add is rather good, and there are native apps for iOS and Android. Most important for me is their flexible API that allows me to access RTM wherever I am (Gmail, Emacs, etc.)

With the release of Siri came a new ability - creating tasks and TODOs with voice commands. Apple provided a mechanism (CalDav) for hooking Siri directly into RTM but I was surprised to discover that Google Now, Android’s reponse to Siri, did not come with the same ability…

…Until Now

Google Now can send email via voice command. Our recipe for automatic task creation involves sending yourself an email message that is then, via Gmail rules, forwarded to RTM and removed from you Inbox.

Step 1: Send yourself a message with Google Now. On most Android phones this can be achieved by using the Voice Search app. The script is “Send email to YOUR_NAME, subject YOUR_TASK_WITH_DATE.” For example, “Send email to Benjamin, subject Finish your blog post about creating tasks on Android.” You need to include the word subject because otherwise Google Now will put task in the body of the message which RTM can’t parse.

Step 2: Set up a Gmail rule to forward the task to RTM. You can find your RTM email address for creating tasks by checking the RTM settings under the Info tab. Go into Gmail, find the message that you just sent to yourself, click on the dropdown arrow next to the reply button and select “filter messages like this.” You’ll want to make sure the filter captures messages from the email address on your phone (probably your Gmail account) to your Gmail account. The message should skip the inbox, be marked as read, and forwarded to the RTM email you found earlier.

Step 3: Profit! Try sending another message to yourself with Google Now and rejoice when you see it appear in your RTM inbox. Note that this procedure will also cause messages sent to yourself to be forwarded to RTM. To avoid this you can put a special word in the subject line that Gmail will need to receive before the message is forwarded.