ConceptDraw Lab has produced a little Dashboard widget that “partially implements Getting Things Done” by allowing for the quick creation of iCal to-dos without the need to open iCal.

It works by presenting each calendar in iCal as an Inbox, which can be selected from a drop-down menu at the top of the widget.

Entering text then creates to-dos attached to the selected calendar.

In the Next Events view, it displays all events scheduled for today.

Despite my normal charitable outlook, I struggled to see how this would gain a place in someone’s GTD toolbox.

Event Maker remains the tool of choice for creating iCal events and to-dos for those not using MailTags or Quicksilver (one, two Hawk Wings post on Quicksilver and iCal) to do the same job.

For power and ease of use Event Maker is hard to beat.

Perhaps I am becoming a “Productivity snob”. It’s not always about power. For some people this might be just the ticket and serve as an excellent bucket for collecting things to do.

GTD widget for iCal is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, to-do, events, calendars, GTD, getting things done, not apple mail, quicksilver, productivity, widgets, dashboard

Somehow mutt never dies or outlives its usefulness (see earlier Hawk Wings post, “mutt: A thing of beauty is a joy forever“).

At least, that’s the experience of the writer at dot unplanned .

Last week, he had one of those days on which Mail.app just refuses to behave:

Mail is just grinding and grinding and beachballing and gray-timering and I’m getting sick of it. Since most Mac mail apps suck, I usually end up on a primitivist kick, dusting off my old .muttrc and fixing things up a little and going in there to live.

As part of moving back in with mutt, he installed Alberto Bertogli’s X-Label scripts , which create custom headers that can store tags or metadata like MailTags or Gmail’s label feature.

Frank Barknecht likes Alberto’s scripts too. In fact, he has gone as far as adapting the X-Label script for Dave Allen’s “Getting Things Done” work management philosophy, and combining it with Kowey’s GTD/mutt macros to produce an elegant GTD solution with not a GUI in sight.

I take my hat off to these people. You can’t understand a word they write but, Golly, they are getting things done. mail.app, apple mail, mutt, X-Labels, scripts, GTD, getting things done, Mail.app on the Fritz

Ghost Park Software has released a simple, slick and polished app “for keeping track of your to-dos using the simple and stress-free Getting Things Done method”.

It comes from the “lean and mean” end of the GTD app market and looks more like Actiontastic than Midnight Inbox and other “eye-candy heavy” apps:

Context, Project and Action views provide powerful and flexible ways to carry your to-dos forward.

The developers give a lot of attention to syncing, which is good. Ghost Action has full two-way synchronization with iCal. It can also synchronize with any iSync-compatible device — a PDA, an iPod or a phone.

Syncing options are provided in the app’s Preferences:

One user provides Ghost Park with a full praise for its clever syncing:

I love the fact that Ghost Action recognizes the
project name in the to-dos imported from iCal (like “some task [Project 
X]”). Very handy, that means I can enter to-dos on my Palm and and they will be properly synchronized to Ghost Action through iCal. Cool! — Ksenia Marasan

Ghost Action is an universal binary and shareware (USD 19.95). You can get a free 14-day demo from the developer’s web site.

It seems like just yesterday that I wrote up “Ten Mac Tools for Getting Things Done“. Now it could easy be twenty Mac tools, all of them high quality solutions.

Ghost Action has the edge in sync options. Actiontastic gets brownie points for Quicksilver integration.not apple mail, getting things done, GTD, productivity, to-do, task management, getting organised, ical, syncing, isync

Actiontastic is a “a lean mean” Getting Things Done app which is nice clean interface and no distractions from its main job of helping you manage your contexts and tasks.

An updated version (0.9) adds support for iCal syncing via OS X’s Sync Services and corrects a few minor bugs that make it faster and more efficient to use.

iCal syncing, like the iPod syncing added in the previous update, is handled by a new button at the bottom of the app’s interface.

The first time the button is pressed, you are greeted by an alert:

After a sync, you will find that each of your “contexts” has become a separate calendar in iCal, with the “actions” for that context added as iCal to-dos. (This is GTD lingo for the place in which you do things and the things that you need to do).

Additional options are handled by Actiontastic’s preferences, which among other things offer an option to remove Actiontastic from Sync Services.

Read the small print though, as this will require the removal of all the existing contexts in Actiontastic before the conduit can be activated again.

I really like the look of this app (although I use Mail.app for the actual GTD work Actiontastic does). It stands at the opposite end of the interface spectrum from Midnight Inbox which has a more “bling bling” approach to productivity.

Actiontastic is beta-ware (free) although time limited to 28 February, by which time another version will be available. You can get it from Jon Crosby’s web site .

UPDATE: Jon has released version 0.9.1 which corrects some iCal niggles in the 0.9 release. Get it here . ical, getting things done, gtd, syncing, context, actions, productivity, nice interface, task management, not apple mail

Past Hawk Wings posts have talked about how spending less time with your email can lead to getting more things done (“Addicted to Email? Dr Tom has the cure“, “Emailing to live, not living to email“, “Inbox Zero: Slash and Burn at 43 Folders“).

In the end, they all depend on willpower.

A poster on macOSXHints has come up with the answer for people without willpower — using a timer switch to cut off internet access for some portion of the day.

He suggests a couple of set-up to cut off varying degrees of connectivity.

Another poster notes in the comments that the new Airport Extreme allows for a child protection option that also cuts connectivity off for a set period. A bonus for the inner child in us all.tough love, productivity, getting things done, GTD, email, internet, mail.app, apple mail, addiction

Web Daily Worker has posted a list of twenty ways to organise your to-dos.

Options include everything from the writer’s personal low-tech favourite (some sheets of paper stapled together) to purpose-built task management apps, passing things like wikis, web-based to-do services, PDAs and Filofaxes along the way.

If you have a few minutes to kill and don’t actually feel like getting anything done, it’s an interesting read. Perhaps the writer cheats a little to get to twenty, but there will be no stone-throwing in this little glass house.

Some of the items were new to me. David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner PDF templates seem full of promise, a pre-made version of the “Back to Paper” system propounded by Bill Westerman , Mike Rohde and others.

Equally surprising are the omissions. With so many good desktop and web-based apps now available, it’s odd to see so many missing.todo, task management, GTD, Getting Things Done, productivity, getting organized, new years resolution

It’s that time of year again.

Here are two lists of greatest hits for the year: the five stories that readers liked the most (that is, the five stories with the highest number of page impressions) and the five stories that I liked the most or felt made the greatest contribution to the themes of the blog:

Readers’ favourites:

1. Ten Mac Tools for Getting Things Done
2. 292 different Apple Mail icons
3. Another Mail.app rule to catch image spam
4. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have
5. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail

My favourites

1. “Talking Mail.app” series wrap up – Merlin Mann, John Gruber, Leander Kahney, Drunken Batman and many more on what’s good about Mail and what sucks.
2. Hacking Quicksilver’s Cube interface for bigger icons – Get readable icons for Quicksilver’s new(ish) Cube interface.
3. Rebuild your database and speed up Mail.app – Simple steps to a speed and space increase.
4. Get your hands on Mail 3.0 now – Getting Tiger Mail’s new features now.
5. Roll your own Mail.app stamp icon – A template for creating a Mail stamp icon of your very own.

mail.app, apple mail, productivity, quicksilver, icons, spam, getting things done, GTD, tips, junk