Anxiety is a new and well-crafted “no frills” task mananger for Leopard that manages a list of your to-dos and syncs them with iCal and Mail.app.

Personally, I like the big, fully-featured approach to task management (OmniFocus, iGTD , etc), but not everyone needs all the bells and whistles.

If these big hitters are not for you, then Anxiety is well worth a look. As the developer says, “With a tiny desktop footprint and clean minimalist aesthetics, the application is simultaneously small, beautiful and effective”.

It presents a simple list of outstanding tasks, which can be displayed and hidden again by clicking on the app’s Menubar or Dock icon:

When it has focus, hitting Return brings up a pane to create a new task. Tabbing through you can quickly enter the task and assign it to the calendar of your choice. Once it is created in iCal, it is soon synced into Leopard Mail as well.

Double-clicking on a task in the list opens the to-do in Mail or opens the task’s Edit pane in iCal (you can set this in the app’s Preferences).

Checking the box on the left, completes the task, which turns a violent green and then disappears.

Anxiety’s Preferences allow you to determine whether it displays tasks by individual calendar or in a unified list, whether the icon is displayed in the Dock, Menubar or both, and various display options:

Anxiety is freeware (donations not refused) and is available - along with a comprehensive list of its many virtues - from the developer’s web site .

[Via digg ]

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MenuCalendarClock is a menubar app for iCal that gives you quick access to your iCal events and to-dos. Another menubar app, High Priority, had the jump on it in Tiger, as High Priority offered the ability to create new to-dos and mark tasks as completed.

Now, the new Leopard-friendly MenuCalendarClock 3.0 offers the same interaction with to-dos. There are no plans to rewrite High Priority for Leopard, so MenuCalendarClock is worth another look.

It adds a menubar item with the date and/or the time, replacing the default System date/time display. Clicking on it opens a drop-down box with the current month, and a list of events and tasks for the day which can be toggled on and off.

Hovering over the calendar displays a tooltip containing that day’s events.

The Action wheel opens a menu with options to reveal a search field, copy today’s date into the clipboard, display the app’s preferences and more.

MenuCalendarClock is also very well provided with keyboard shortcut. By default Control-Option-Command-C pops down the display, although the combination can be set by the user in the preferences.

A further option in the preferences enables a tooltip display of the days events and to-dos when the mouse is hovered over the menubar item.

The Preference Pane controls options for general display, customising the font and colour of the time display and the choice of a number of icons.

Further options allow you to set which iCal calendars it should display and options for dealing with the birthdays of your Address Book contacts.

New in the latest version is the ability to create tasks and to edit and mark them as complete. Needless to say this passes through seamlessly into iCal and Leopard Mail’s new to-do lists.

A keyboard shortcut pops up a “heads up display” for creating a new task. I find it easier to use that the list of to-dos in Mail (subject for another post, but why are Mail’s to-do features so underdone?!).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like one can tab through the fields in the display, which is a pain. Also I find that I can associate a to-do with any of my iCal calendars in MenuCalendarClock, something I can’t do in Mail.app. The to-do icons are colour-coded to the particular iCal calendar. The option to colour the text of the to-do as well would be nice.

Highlighting a task, pressing Command-I to bring up the Inspector allows existing to-dos to be edited, Shift-Command-C marks it as complete. It’s fast and it’s easy to master.

MenuCalendarClock costs USD 19.95 to register. You will need to buy a licence to access the to-do management features, although some basic features can be used when it is unregistered. Also, it does the job in English, German, Finnish, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

Get it from the developer’s web site .

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A new Getting Things Done (GTD) app from Hog Bay Software brings an extreme and focussed minimalism to task management.

It doesn’t transfer data to your iPod or iPhone, or sync information with facebook, or grab an audio soundbite from iTunes for each project, or have fifteen user-customisable icons for each context. It just does lists, projects, tasks and contexts. And it does them very well.

The interface is simple:

Simple keyboard shortcuts start a new project or task. Contexts (or what the app calls ‘tags’) with @ prepended are stored and can be set to autocomplete on future tasks.

Tasks for each context across a variety of projects are easily and cleanly displayed by selecting the context from a drop down list:

Completed tasks can be archived, which shifts them down to the bottom of the document and removes from the project and context-specific display.

If I had time to maintain a GTD life outside Mail.app, I would use something like this. There is no opportunity to waste time tweaking endless options which are peripheral to achieving the task management that these apps are designed to provide. Although there are plenty of other GTD apps for Mac users (see an earlier Hawk Wings post or Ed Eubanks’ round-up at Low End Mac), none of them offers the forocious “Productivity Boot Camp” discipline of TaskPaper. I find that helpful.

You can get a copy of TaskPaper from the Hog Bay web site. It costs USD 18.95 although the free 14-day demo period gives you a chance to discover if this the approach that works for you.

Disclaimer: Jesse Grosjean kindly gave me free registration so that I could try this out.

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Dutch software developer Johannes Verelst has written up his system for Getting Things Done (Dave Allen’s task management philosophy) with Mail.app and iCal.

(If you are mystified about endless references to “Getting Things Done” (or GTD), Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders is still the best way to lift the fog. See his recent “Getting Things Done: Recap for ‘07″ post for a list of red-hot how-tos and tutorials on boiling GTD down to something workable for you, or jump right into his “Getting started with GTD.” )

Johannes’ way of using Mail.app to get things done is not like my own Mail.app GTD system which makes it all the more interesting and useful to read. There is always something to learn from people who do things differently.

I make an effort to keep everything in Mail, which then acts as my “Bucket”, processing hub and also my to-do list. Less swapping from app to app helps me to focus on getting the tasks done.

Johannes likes to dump stuff out to iCal. He uses calendars to separate out his projects and contexts. A clever combination of Mail Act-on, Quicksilver and applescript helps him to create an all-encompassing system.

I use MailTags to set iCal to-dos, but only so iCal’s alarm will shoot a reminder back into my inbox about something that needs to get done. MailTags’ keywords for @Action, @Waiting and @Defer and its project tags give me enough power and control to manage a confusion of Real Life, blogging, freelancing and family tasks efficiently.

While Mail remains for me what Johannes calls a “Cockpit”, he uses DoBeDo as his cockpit, managing his to-dos through the widget’s interface.

His GTD toolbox list at the end of the post shows that his system is up and running for less than USD 70 (and most of that is for the software to sync his Palm T|X). It pays for itself in a week at the outside.

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How I haven’t seen this before, I don’t know.

Do It (formerly known as ToDo) is a very nifty, tricked-out task or to-do management app that features everything but the kitchen sink — Address Book integration, Quicksilver plugin, syncing, lists for each context, skins and more.

In the app’s readme file, the developer describes it as “a small application to manage categorized to do lists. Each to do item can be linked with a file on your computer, a URL, such as the address of a web site, or a contact from your address book. The linked file or URL can be opened directly from the Do It window.”

The interface is nicely done.

Clicking the orange arrows moves from one category (or Context for GTDers) list to the next, and items within each are ordered by priority.

If an item has a file or URL linked to it, clicking the small arrow on the right jumps to the file or web page.

Double-clicking the item’s title allows it to be edited. To edit other details of the item, you need to click the “i” button at the bottom or use ⌘-I:

The details are stored in a “MailTags-like” smoked glass pane.

Hovering the cursor over “To Do …” slides down a Notes field and the “Deadline …” (not visible here because it is expanded already) opens up options to add reminders for the task in iCal, use an alarm and something called “Auto upgrade priority”.

I couldn’t work out what that last options does, but it sounds pretty cool.

Dragging a file from Finder or a URL from your browser over the Linked Item box stores it with the task. Here you see the URL of Do It’s web site, but it could just as easily be the TextMate draft of the post.

Do It is designed to be skinned and the developer maintains a list of user-submitted skins:

Quicksilver nuts like me will love the fact that the developer has written a Quicksilver plugin for Do It.

Install it from the Do It menu, quit and relaunch Quicksilver and creating to-do is just a Quicksilver activation keystroke away:

After hitting return, a supplementary dialog appears allowing you to assign the new to-do to the category or context or your choice:

In another nice piece of integration, Do It comes with an Address Book plugin which offers contextual menu options to set reminders to email or phone people in your Address Book:

A similar additional screen lets the reminder be assigned to the category of your choice.

Syncing with .Mac options are controlled within the app’s Preferences.

As if all of that is not unbelievable enough, Do It is freeware.

You can get a copy of it from the developer’s web site .

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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.

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