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

Jon Crosby has released a new beta of his Actiontastic “Getting Things Done” app (see earlier Hawk Wings reviews here and here).

There are now lots of GTD apps for Mac. This one doesn’t have all the eye-candy of GTD apps like Midnight’s Inbox which you will either love or dislike. Actiontastic also comes with a slick Quicksilver plugin that makes filling your task bucket extra easy.

The updated version features a very useful new addition — it can now sync to a iPod, allowing musical GTDers to take their projects and to-dos with them.

It also has a new tool for processing its inbox.

Hit F3 and a dialog appears which helps you to move quickly through your unfiled tasks, assigning them to projects and contexts with drop-down menus:

Normally, new betas come with a list of bullet-pointed improvements which I try to rewrite into something more interesting. Developer Jon Crosby has taken a different approach:

To get away from the industry-standard bulleted feature list, let’s just walk through a typical flow from idea to action — GTD-style.

His write up of the new beta in action is very fine. I won’t repeat it here. You should read it, even if you use another app.

The public beta is available from his web site and expires on 15 January, by which time I imagine there will be another beta or, if all goes well, a final release.GTD, getting things done, productivity, not apple mail, workflow, task management, quicksilver, ipod, syncing

Up-and-coming GTD productivity app Actiontastic has a new public beta (beta 3, app version 0.8.2).

The updated version has a completely rewritten database. Several interface improvements add extra grunt without sacrificing the underlying interface design goal of “a lean mean action contextifying machine”, among them a new drawer for adding notes to inbox items, projects, contexts and actions, better drag and drop, smarter editing of existing events and a shortcut to turn actions quickly into projects.

But the real show-stopper in this release is the Quicksilver action which comes bundled with the release and which you can install by double-clicking on the file in the disk image (as John rightly points out in the comments):

You can use it to file a thought quickly into the app’s inbox or select text in an email or web page, hit ⌘-` (you may need to disable Front Row first for this to work) and watch as Quicksilver fills an initial text field with the words you selected, letting you quickly execute the Actiontastic action and file it. Nifty.

The public beta is available from his web site and expires on 18 December.

[Via TUAW ] GTD, getting things done, productivity, not apple mail, workflow, task management

Jon Crosby has released a public beta of his new GTD application Actiontastic which takes a powerfully simple approach to implementing David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” approach to productivity.

I’ve only played with it for thirty minutes, but it looks very likely to earn a place in my list of Ten GTD apps for Mac Users. I like it.

The interface is intentionally sparse and focussed (Jon says that the app is designed to be “a lean mean action contextifying machine”):

New projects and actions can be added in the Inbox, the Project view lists actions and their contexts for each project and the Context view lists actions by context, including an option to view just the next action in each context.

It’s beta software. As the release notes warn “because this is a pre-release version of the upcoming 1.0 release, please note that it may behave in strange ways on your Mac.”

It includes hints of features still to come like web syncing.

Jon is actively seeking feedback and user requests.

The public beta is available from his web site and expires on 12 October, by which time I imagine there will be another beta or, if all goes well, a final release.GTD, getting things done, productivity, not apple mail, workflow, task management

Ethan Schoonover’s KinklessGTD is probably the most comprehensive, flexible, elegant and powerful implementation of Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done task management philosophy for Mac users. Others swear by the various GTD wikis now available.

EasyTask Manager offers something less ambitious that will appeal to many. It is a task manager based around the GTD schema which offers two-way syncing of to-dos and calendars with iCal.

The interface is nice and clean:

It is easy to create new tasks and projects, and assign contexts and priorities.

Syncing with iCal appears smooth and trouble-free with the 15 tasks to which the demo is limited (UPDATE: although see the comments for some bugs and niggles). Tasks can be marked as completed in either iCal or EasyTask Manager.

A Preferences pane allows you set a number of options for its interaction with iCal:

EasyTask Manager 1.5.5 was released yesterday, fixing a bug in the process of completing or deleting tasks and introducing an internal update facility for registered users.

It doesn’t have the power of some of the other implementations, but what is does offer, it does well. And it is cheaper. At USD 19.99 it costs less to run than kGTD, which requires you to own a full copy of OmniOutliner Pro (USD 69.95).

EasyTask Manager is available from the developer’s web site .GTD, getting things done, productivity, iCal, task management, to-dos, projects