Hawk Wings reader Jon Yates emails to ask, “Any idea how to print a list of all your to do headings in OSX Leopard mail.app?”

Good question! I don’t think you can. At least, I can’t work it out (which may not be the same thing).

Luckily because of the new system-wide task database in Leopard, your choices are not restricted to Mail.

You can, of course, do it in iCal. But it takes a lot of stuffing around with the options in the Print dialog to whittle things down to a lean, tasks-only list. And then more clicking to get it to print out as, for example, a PDF.

But in the end you can get there:

You could do it in a GTD app like OmniFocus or Things, but that seems like a hammer and walnut solution for the problem. Jon just want to email a list of tasks.

Fortunately, a quicker, more efficient and free solution is not far away. The task management widget DoBeDo (which also does a lot of other things — see earlier Hawk Wings post) has a print option that can quick spit out a list of tasks in Preview as a PDF or to a specified printer.

After you set the option on the back of the widget, it is a one step operation (mouse-click or ⌘P), and produces a nice list:

It also has a one-click option (⌘E) to send the list to an email address that you specify.

DoBeDo has recently been updated, and now features a “Last Day of the Month” scheduling option and treats “procrastinated” tasks without a due date as due today.

It also has more skins that the last time I looked (selection below):

The Apple Calendar skin looks nice next to the other black widgets in Dashboard:

DoBeDo is freeware. It is available along with detailed documentation of its options and keyboard shortcuts from the developer’s web site .

Tags: Apple Mail, apple mail tips, dobedo, iCal, Leopard, lists, mail.app, pdf, printing, Productivity, tasks, todos, widget

Related posts

• Get your hands on Mail 3.0 now
• Five favourite time-saving Leopard Tips
• To Do X: The Rolls Royce of To Do apps
• Mail2iCal 1.5: Events, to-dos by AppleScript
• Event Maker 0.4: iCal events from Mail.app

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Apple Mail, Productivity, iCal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.