I'm a System Administrator, and between supporting end users, working on new projects, and just maintaining all the systems I administrate, it's hard to find the time to get everything done. I know I've found time management to be a difficult thing to tackle because of constant interruptions, but there's a book I've read that is really pointed to my situation. Time Management for System Administrators by Tom Limoncelli is a great read for anyone who either needs help organizing their time, or could use some great, new ideas. It says for "System Administrators," but it is a great Getting Things Done book for anyone who has a high volume of things to do and a lot of interruptions for new tasks. Here is a way to use Remember the Milk to follow Limoncelli's system.

The basis of this system is to have a single, main list. You can expand this to different worlds (home, work, etc.), but you'll want to have everything you have to work together in one list. To start, enter all of the things you don't want to forget about, but don't plan on actively working on anytime soon. Enter these with no due date, and you can classify them further with the priorities if you want. Next, enter due dates for any tasks with a particular reason to wait to deal with them. Finally, enter a due today of today for everything else. For everything that will be due today, you'll need to assign priorities in a particular way. For the highest priority (P1), choose only the tasks you know you can actually complete today. For P2, choose everything you would work on after the first group, and things that you would do tomorrow. Make the rest P3.

To work through this system, each day you dedicate all of your time to P1 tasks due today. As new things come up, you quickly add them to your list with a due date of today, but with the priority set to 2 or 3 depending on the importance (or 1 if it absolutely needs to be done today). Once the day is over, you can move up your P2 tasks to be P1, and do the same with P3 tasks to P2 (as long as you don't create too many P1 tasks for the next day). If you ever finish all of your P1 tasks in a day, you can move up some of your P2 tasks. This allows you to focus on what needs to be done each day, and not waste any brain-power dealing with things that come up during the day.

A great RtM feature you get to use with this system is the search list. You can create a search for your daily tasks by searching your main list for everything P1 that's due today. After prepping for the day, you can switch to this search list so you can actually finish everything on your to-do list! It's very demoralizing to see a list of hundreds of tasks every day, so this lets you see the progress you're making. It's a small, psychological little trick, but it's definitely helpful. There are lots of other RtM features that work perfectly with this system as well, such as the time estimates, repeating tasks, and reviewing completed tasks (such as before a job review).