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.

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Merlin Mann offers to-do list advice in MacWorld’s “Working Mac” column.

He outlines some tips for using calendar groups and using a separate calendar for each context in which you work. The iCal section is rounded out with some suggestions for using its alarms.

Then there is a whole lot of stuff on Entourage.

Finally, Merlin lays down some principles for creating plain text to-do lists, which lack the bling-bling of other options but are easy to edit, transfer, sync and read.

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This week Address Book and iCal get the lion’s share of the additions to the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

The following items were added to the Address Book section:

• AddressBookQuickEntry (an alternate entry interface for contact information)
• AusAB (maps, travel directions and Sydney public transport times for Australian addresses)
• iAddressX (Address Book menubar utility)

The following were added to the iCal section:

• DoBeDo (a Dashboard widget for iCal ToDos)
• iCalViewer (”Streaming” desktop iCal events and ToDos)
• MenuCalendarClock (menubar utility for you iCal calendar, clock and ToDo and event information)

Mail.app itself scored two extra entries:

• anentry (AppleScript to email a NetNewsWire headline) in the Integration with other Apps section
• NetShred X (history and cache shredder for Mail.app and browsers) in the Added Functionality section

These additions bring the number of entries on the list to a round 120, all making Mail.app, Address Book and iCal easier, more efficient, more productive and (possibly) more fun to use.

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Georg Klein has released updated versions of Mail2iCal (1.4) and Mail2iCalToDo (1.4), applescripts that will create an iCal event or ToDo from a message in Mail.app.

There doesn’t appear to be a changelog anywhere, but I am guessing that these new scripts are better than the old ones in several interesting and important ways.

UPDATE: And I guessed right. Georg posts in the comments:

1.4 adds a (limited) means for calendar designation: when run from a rule, the scripts will place the calendars in a calendar named after the rule, creating a new calendar if necessary. Since many users seem to use the scripts with Mail ActOn, the scripts try to determine the Mail ActOn prefix and delimiter, using only the last part of the rulename as calendar (e.g. “ActOn: e | Important” will lead to a calendar named Important). Manual execution is unchanged.

You can get the latest versions from Georg’s web site.

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High Priority is a System Preferences Add-on that allows you to create, edit and delete iCal ToDos directly from the menubar without the need to have iCal open.

The System Preference pane contains options which allow you to sort the ToDos by Calendar, Due Date, Priority, Status or Title and to toggle the display of priority icons:

An Advanced tabs offers more options for the display of your ToDos, including a choice of menubar icons and option to display ToDos in calendar colours.

Another tab allows you to set hotkeys for various actions.

Clicking on the menubar icon displays your ToDos (in this case sorted by Calendar):

Command-Clicking on a ToDo opens a dialog for editing every field of the ToDo including the notes, or marking it as completed.

You can use it as freeware, but the unregistered version is unable to create new ToDos.

High Priority is shareware (USD 6) and is available from the developer’s web site.

UPDATE: Version 1.01.0 released on 14 January 2006 adds further refinements. High Priority now respects the visibility of iCal calendars, has improved Calendar parsing and error handling and better optimization.

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Mail2iCal and Mail2iCalToDo have been updated.

These AppleScripts will create an event or a ToDo in iCal from a highlighted message in Mail.app.

The new versions of the scripts fix a hiccup that could occur if no message was selected and add a feedback option for users in the event of an error.

The author has also added comments throughout the source code.

Mail2iCal 1.3.1 and Mail2iCalToDo 1.3.3 are freeware and are available from the developer’s web site.

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