Indeed, it is a good question. Cue the following recording...

Sorting, as it exists, was not originally part of RTM. It was added on 8/1/07, and those three sort options (priority, date, alphabetical) are better than nothing, but...

These boards are littered with threads by people suggesting different sorting schemes. A very non-comprehensive list follows, including several that ask for just what you desire...

http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/279/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/552/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/783/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/1448/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/1547/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/1891/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/1910/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/2243/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/2514/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/2854/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/2856/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/2879/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/3145/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/3158/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/3206/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/3233/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/3742/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/3835/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/3989/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/help/4043/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/4472/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/5062/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/5210/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/6289/
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/help/6629/

So when you hear cranky ol' timers lament that the UI of the RTM site has lain dormant while other things have been attended to - GMail, iPhone, &c. - this is exactly the sort of thing we're talking about. I really hope some basic things, like per-list, multi-variate, customizable sorting, are addressed before Bob turns his attention to Outlook syncing, for example.

* The idea that smartlists have access to an operator that would specify sorting is one of the many great ideas found in the threads above. I think that would help make RTM's best feature even better.

BTW ranbarton, thanks for the links...and for crushing my dreams.

RTM devs...if you'd be so kind, I'd be interested to hear your justification for not adding this?

And I quote:
"emily (Remember The Milk) says:

Thanks for the suggestion - we'll be looking at making the sorting more flexible in the future.

Does anyone else have different ways that they'd like to be able to sort their lists? We'd love to hear feedback on this.

Posted at 10:09am on November 5, 2005"

Here's my favorite snippet from the quote: "we'll be looking at making the sorting more flexible in the future."

I just have four last words..."the future is now"

we.kanes, we did add sorting -- if you were using the app back in 2005 when I wrote that, as Ran mentioned there was no sorting whatsoever other than the default sort (by priority, due date, then task name). :)

We're still very much aware of the requests for additional sorting options (along with the many, many hundreds of different requests that you guys send us ;)

Most new features require a minimum of one week for development and testing, no matter how trivial an enhancement might seem. Some features require up to six months or a year (for the bigger stuff like mobile clients that folks are very fond of requesting :).

If that's multiplied out by hundreds and hundreds of different feature requests (no exaggeration!), you'll begin to see why we might not have reached the potential feature that you're a fan of (we'd have enough development to keep us busy for 20+ years...).

Please keep in mind that everyone has a different favourite feature that they'd like to see added to RTM; so if the next feature that we add isn't the one you wanted, please remember that to someone else, that feature is incredibly important (we wouldn't have developed it if it wasn't! :)

Thanks for the response. I understood his comment to mean that the sorting you had in '05 was exactly what we have now. That's scary to think that there wasn't any sorting choices at all! :0

At any rate, I think you can understand that it's frustrating for a lot of people that so much time is spent on RTM's connections when the core product is seemingly ignored. I would expect the foundational product to be improved upon before providing all these other bells and whistles...or at least while all of the bells and whistles are added.

As a developer myself, I fully understand prioritization, my only concern is that you are ignoring the core product. I should note, I'm sure you are not, but in the time that I have been using RTM, I've seen little visible improvement on that core product. Other products are so attractive, even though they don't have the potential that RTM has, simply because the foundation is improved upon first.

A few points-

@we.kanes: I was not trying to crush your dreams. When I compile threads like this, my purpose is twofold - to highlight the depth of expressed interested among users on the boards, and to unify the threads on a given topic. Some issues have managed to stick to one thread, and others (like sorting) have sprawled over a wide number of them, so that it can be hard to see how the conversation has evolved over time.

I am not trying to compile these lists to make the RTM team look bad. Emily's points above are very believable about the effort that would go into incorporating all of the requests that can be found on the boards, not to mention the UI one would have to contend with if all of those features were implemented.

I will repeat a portion of my comments above, as I think it bears saying again: So when you hear cranky ol' timers lament that the UI of the RTM site has lain dormant while other things have been attended to - GMail, iPhone, &c. - this is exactly the sort of thing we're talking about. I really hope some basic things, like per-list, multi-variate, customizable sorting, are addressed before Bob turns his attention to Outlook syncing, for example.

I think that the RTM team could, with far less than 20 years of effort, review these boards for the most requested features, and then using an 80/20 (or 95/5) rule, focus on 3-6 that would address essentially all of the most commonly repeated requests. I have no idea how much overhead goes into the maintenance of the site and its associated services, so I cannot venture to guess how many manhours per week maintenance takes versus the development of new features, but it seems that for some time now it's been nearly 100% maintenance and almost 0% development. Perhaps the addition of the new staff members will free up some resources to enhance the RTM site proper.

Having said all of this, I will say again that I find RTM to be head and shoulders above any other similar solution on the web, and I wish them every success as they steer this site forwards.

Yeah, what I said was tongue-in-cheek, though there is some truth to it.

It's just...so...frustrating... Greasemonkey scripts are, for the most part, the biggest reason I've come back to RTM. It just seems odd that the core UI really hasn't changed since I first saw RTM years ago. Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful for some of the work they've done apart from user requests, such as Gmail integration. But I want simple things like sorting by date added, shortcut to More Actions menu, a better tag cloud, option to show total tasks in list tab.

Fortunately for me Greasemonkey exists and some talented people out there have developed some incredibly useful scripts.

The thing I keep telling myself is, "RTM has so much potential!!" I'd happily pay a monthly subscription fee, I think others would too, just to see the improvements I need to use this without extra tools.

we.kanes says:

"I'd happily pay a monthly subscription fee, I think others would too, just to see the improvements I need to use this without extra tools."

I second that motion. Emily and RTM team, I am a developer as well. I understand the cost and time involved. I love your app but it will not work on love alone.

How about a Free service, a Pro service and a Premium service. I would be willing to pay $20/mo. gladly. Make the cow grow, please!

Agreed we.kanes and gui.azurdia.

Many people have pleaded to pay more money for implementing a few of the requested core product improvements. Unfortunately, I don't think it is going to happen anytime soon :(

But here hoping...

To developers:

Firstly, be glad that RTM is so good you have a million feature requests! Obviously you're doing a good job or otherwise people wouldn't care so much, lol.

Secondly, IMHO this kind of "ehem, simple?" feature should take priority over the bigger, more complicated feature requests. Obviously I'm biased, but in all seriousness, the UI is the most important feature to any software product. No offense, but if I'm going to really USE RTM, I gotta be able to work with my tasks. Not being able to find a task you just made because it gets sorted in some wonky way without you even wanting that is really annoying, and detracts badly against me making use of RTM. What features would you rather work on?

1) A feature which everyone using RTM needs because it's just basic good UI or
2) A feature that adds "above-and-beyond" value to an already great working system?

Ok, ok I'm done making my point. It's your product not mine.

I suggest putting up a poll of top requested features people can vote on, and then working on the ones that get the most votes.

I agree. I'm a relatively new user, and I've tried all the competition before settling on RTM. I like RTM that it has iPhone support, and Gmail integration, and Firefox integration, and reminders, and unicode support, and multi-lingual interface. All the features are so cool that no one else has!

But when I actually start to use the system, uhhh... I keep stumbling into such obvious missing things in the UI and I keep thinking, whaaa? I can't possibly be the only person missing such obvious features? And some of those missing UI things are so obvious and seem to be so easy to implement, in relation to other features that they chose to implement.

Unfortunately, the RTM features that attracted me to RTM in the first place are not available in others, so I stay with RTM, and keep grumbling.

For what it's worth, I'm another (recent) pro user who would like to see sorting based on the added date available. I'd love to hear that what I'm suggesting is already there and I just didn't realize it (even if a grumpy person wants to call me a NooB and tell me to RTFM).

It seems acceptable (at least initially) if sorting by date added was a feature only available as part of the query for a Smart List. That would meet my needs directly and be a fair solution to at least sophisticated users who want to sort lists that way. (When I became a pro user, one benefit advertised was possible access to new features being tested. This sounds like a perfect candidate for that.)

Here's my example of why this feature is important to me. I use RTM for my home next actions list and it works pretty well as that list is fairly short. However, my work next actions list has over 100 items. Due to RTM limitations (some of them being my lack of feature knowledge such not knowing until today that date added existed) I use an Excel spreadsheet for my work next actions list. (Yes, yuck, I know, but it does allow for nice features like automatically coloring cells of items based on priority and date as they start to get stale.)

While the 1, 2, 3 priorities are still appropriate for my work next actions, it takes a lot of time to read through the entire list so I don't always find/make the time to do so. Therefore, while I sort by priority, I sort by dated added in increasing date order within priority . That way I can at least quickly look at each of my set of 1, 2, and 3 priority items and see if the oldest items need to be upgraded in priority, acted on immediately, or in some cases just remove from the list (because they died of old age and no one cared).

As a side not with regard to the balance of adding to the core product and adding integration features, I will add that Jott integration has been key for me and the main reason I came to and am using RTM. (I was a paid Jott subscriber before I went Pro for RTM.) For those of us not willing or able to spend the costly monthly mobile rates for data plans (or not able to convince our boss to cover that), Jott allows adding todo's to lists while mobile helping me along my path of using electronic tools for time management via GTD.

I would just like to say, that sorting by date created, is the one feature I miss the most :-)

a me too - my personal task system uses date added as the primary sort . I can't think of anything else to use in fact - in my work most tasks don't really have due dates.

RTM has been strongly recommended to me, but without this I'm kind of stuck!

I would also benefit from this feature. As I also not using due dates, mostly I would like to sort by added date.

Sorted from the oldest to the newest added.

I've added my +1 to a couple of the other Sorting threads, but this seems like the one with the most momentum.

+1

+1

Assuming this feature dosen't get implemented, is there any way to use smart lists to try and find stale tasks?

sort by added date +1

+1

+1

I emailed them a few days ago about this, and got this response:

"We don't have any announcements regarding this at this time; sorry."

+1
plz support the 'sort by added date' !!
because I use RTM as a job-notebook, but not a strict calendar.

+1 I would like to see RTM support both ascending and descending sort by date added.

Thanks !

+1

This is a repost from another long thread on this topic:

This has been bugging me since I switched to RTM and I came up with a solution which doesn't look very pretty but it does work. What I have started doing is adding the date which I add the tasks to my lists to the name of the tasks in the following format:

"2010-MM-DD Name of task"

MM = month in digits (October is 10, November is 11 and so on)
DD = day in digits (01, 01, 03 and so on)

I then sort my list/s by task name and RTM uses the date to sort by date. If I sort by due date, for example, RTM sorts by due date and then by my new date added using the dates.

+1 for this feature. Very handy when creating a grocery shopping list. I can add them in the order that I pick them up as I walk the isles of my local stores.

I'd very much like an arbitrary sorting facility, so more choices for sorting definitely gets my vote.

I'll go ahead and beat the dead horse and say this feature of sorting by date added is important to me.