Having read the entry on creating a GTD Tickler file with Zak Greant’s AppleScript, Jennifer emails to ask how exactly you create an iCal event that will run the script every morning.

No doubt there are smarter ways to do this, but my method is outlined after the jump.

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A ‘Tickler file’ is part of the Getting Things Done system in which you can store things that you need to do in the future and be reminded about them in a timely way.

It is a collection of 43 folders (Hey, how about that?) and is managed by a secretary or PA if you are lucky enough to have one, who sorts through the right folder each day and gives you the things you need to do in time to do them.

I don’t have a secretary. In my earlier postings on trying to run GTD in Apple Mail, I simply created a mailbox that I called a ‘Tickler file’. Mail Act-on dumped all my “deferred” things into it and I had to remember to sort them through manually at the start of every week. But no more!

Zak Greant has written an AppleScript that will create and manage a complete set of Tickler folders for you.

The first time you run the script, it creates a full set of folders for you as you can see from the screenshot.

Then you file away the emails containing tasks that you need to do later away into the appropriate week, day and month folder. I’ve thought about creating rules under Mail Act-on to do this, but I think it is doing to be easier in the end to drag ‘n’ drop them from my ‘deferred holding pen’ mailbox into the right folders.

Run the script every day, and it sorts through your folders and delivers the stored emails (flagged and marked as unread) into the @INBOX each day as you need to deal with them. Excellent.

To make this even more bullet-proof, I have created an event in iCal which will run the script for me every morning at 9 am.

Armed with this script, kGTD and Scott’s Morrison’s Mail Act-on and MailTags plug-ins, I have all the tools I need to implement a really good GTD system on my Mac.

Of course, I still need the will to use them and the intelligence to use them well, but that’s another story. Software can’t help there.

Zak has also written some other nifty applescripts like email2ical, which ?ɬ† la the mail2iCal scripts and the fuhgeddaboutit script, creates events in iCal from Mail.app messages.