Second is Mail’s ability to detect date and time text and let me create an iCal event from it. That has saved time having to open iCal and manually transfer all the information.

Everything that comes into a physical inbox (mail, desktop/downloads, ical) gets marked with a green “do it tomorrow” label. Everything that is in my inbox for more than a day gets changed to a blue “do it today” label. I can see all my emails, ical items, files, etc. in using smart folders and quickly focus on what I am supposed to get done today and see what I have waiting for me as I plan for tomorrow. I have a couple other folders like “urgent” (a smart folder- if anything sits in an inbox for more than 4 days it gets red) and an archive filing folder (a physical folder which I gives me up to 5 days to put the files away before they turn back to blue).

The biggest advantage is when I get through everything I should be getting through on a daily basis then I can make time for other things, or typically in my case attack my backlog.

I’m using Notes to manage projects. These contain individual tasks, notes and attached reference material.

Individual tasks are managed by To-Dos.

I use a different iCal calendar for each GTD context.

The problem comes with trying to keep my Day Job Mac sync’d with my Home Mac. I’m losing a lot of links. Gmail IMAP is hugely problematic and entries kept On My Mac don’t seem to sync well at all.

Hey, there’s a new contender on the horizon…Filemaker Pro’s Bento. It’s lightweight (but customizable?) and does a nice job of linking to iCal and Address book. Too bad Mail isn’t integrated as well.

(BTW, does anyone know what is happening with iGTD? As far as I know, there’s been nothing new since August, except a Leopard compatibility fix.)

As for notes & to-dos….those will remain in iGTD. Leopard’s implementation is too limited for my taste. Just hope Bartek updates the broken linking functionality soon.

I like my To Do’s to sit on the calendar day their To Be Done, thereby giving me my full day’s tasks and appointments at a glance, which neither iCal nor Mail let me do.

I’ve created a work-around: I use iCal’s all-day function for To Do’s. As there’s no check-off capability, I created a separate calendar titled “Done.” When I’ve completed the task, I change its calendar affiliation to Done and, hence, its color. If I don’t get it done that day, I slide it to the next day.

It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I’ve come up with me. I’d be interested in hearing if others also prefer their To Do’s to be more fully integrated with their calendar page and, if so, how they’ve worked it.

Likewise, the Notes and ToDos on my MacBook are pretty handy, but syncing sends them into a submenu of my iPhone mail; I have to drill down to find them, and then I can only read them, not add to or edit them. In fact I’m lucky if I get that far: when I create a new note in Mail, it’s automatically created in my “On My Mac” folder, not my IMAP folder, so I have to physically move it myself to sync it, and then often get a message reading “No such mailbox exists.” (For that matter, the whole .Mac end of the iCal/Notes/ToDo experience strikes me as a shambles.) I’ve been trying out iGTD and OmniFocus, but insofar as Mail/iCal doesn’t help them interact with my iPhone, they’re useful only when I’m at home in front of my computer.

How does any of this help me Get Things Done? I’d sworn off Entourage a couple years ago, simply because it’s a Microsoft product, but to be honest I’m thinking seriously about adopting it again…

I have an inbox folder where incoming mail is stored (moved from Incoming after junk mail is filtered out).

If I add a To-Do for an item and then move the mail item, the connectivity is lost. There’s also no way to easily see which messages have To-Dos associated with them.

Then I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea: create a Mail Act-On rule that would highlight a message (I used yellow), then run an Applescript to mark the item as a To-Do. At that point, I could rename the To-Do, etc.

Unfortunately, there is no way (at last that I can find) that would allow a rule or an Applescript to mark an item as a To-Do.

So… anyway, for me, the Notes and To-Dos are simply half-baked. I hope they get a little more done with a Leopard upgrade.

You’re just full of good stuff today aren’t you?