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, syncingSimilar Posts:

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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.

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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 managementSimilar Posts:

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He shows you how to make several clever Mail Act-on rules that interact with Mail’s smart folders and MailTags to create a workflow that works for him.

He also offers a sneaky tip for remapping the Caps Lock key to the Control key function. No more weirdly bent pinkies for him!

As Merlin says,

I’m really just scratching the surface on what you can do with Mail Act-On — I’m sure there are power users out there who are doing much sexier stuff with it — but I wanted to make sure people know that this is most definitely not just for geeks and high-volume email users. In my opinion, this is functionality that should (and eventually will) be included as a stock feature in Mail.app.

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In particular, he is not checking his email first thing in the morning or last thing at night anymore:

I figured that if I wanted to be productive during the day, I’d have to clear out the inbox first. And if I didn’t clear out the inbox at night, I’d be left with even more email to check in the morning. What started out seemingly as a great plan to control my email and become more productive, quickly turned into making my life more cluttered, unscheduled and less productive.

“If you are like me,” Steve Jobs reminded the faithful during last week’s keynote, “you live in Mail”. Glen is finding more life outside Mail by going cold turkey first and last thing:

By not checking your email at night you’ll find that you’ll get more sleep, and you won’t really be missing anything too important anyway. And by not checking your email first thing in the morning, you’ll be more productive throughout the day.

email, productivity, tips, not apple mail, workflow, getting things done

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The addition of to-do’s and notes to Mail may indicate that Apple has some useful ideas for enhancing a “non-glamourous” application like Mail beyond just beautiful eye candy.

But his ambitions for Mail don’t stop there. He would like to see the development of “Folder action”-like workflows through AppleScript and Automator. Some of this is already here, he notes, with Mail Act-on and other plugins. Nonetheless,

I’d love to see the equivalent to the Finder’s Folder Actions for every mailbox in Mail, multiple varieties for core functionality like ‘Reply’…, message threading across mailboxes, automatic filing of messages based on those threads, etc…
…Adding workflows which average users could create and edit, and which would advance automated email handling in ways that makes even die-hard productivity geeks smile, could make Apple Mail stand out from the crowd for more than just its good-looking UI.

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He has a good tagging system in place using the MailTags plugin , but under an avalanche of email, it breaks down.

He has an idea though:

So what would make me use MailTags again (because it is indeed useful)? Mailtags needs to add the ability to tag as a “tab” sequence. Basically: command-N (new), subject – tab – message – tab – tags – shift-command-D to send. That would rock.

Scott Morrison, the developer of MailTags, agrees .mailtags, tagging, metadata, workflow, productivity, apple mail, mail.app, pluginsSimilar Posts:

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In front of this three LCD screens, each with its own function, he reads only 100 emails a day. An assistant reads the rest and provides him with summaries. (Wouldn’t that be nice!).

He says,

We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.

To Do lists are out. Email and his calendar are enough to keep him on track. And paper in general “is no longer a big part of my day”.

The main trick, he says, is maintaining your focus, although he also makes an interesting point about “information underload”—not becoming totally reactive and critically assessing the information to hand:

Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

It’s an interesting article.Bill Gates, email, productivity, workflow

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The mailboxes I have in Mail.app, they’re sorted alphabetically. But I’d like to order them so that personal mailboxes are at the top, and business mailboxes are at the bottom. Do you know if there’s a way to do this?

Good Question.

The Mailbox Drawer lists your Inbox and other “Special Folders” first, then your smart mailboxes and then your local folders.

You can re-order your smart mailboxes by dragging and dropping, but the local folders are always listed in descending alphabetical order.

This is not useful if your most used or most important folders start with letters further down the alphabet.

I know of two ways to change this:

You can add a number to the front of each mailbox that will force them to order in the way that suits your workflow best.

Or you can add spaces to the front of each one, which looks a bit nicer.

The number of spaces that you need will vary. In the image above the top mailbox has three spaces in front of it, the next one two and the last one one. Then the normal alphabetical ordering kicks in.

“Getting Things Done” (GTD) people may be glad to hear that the @ symbol also kicks folders to the top of the list.

These work for me, although I am always glad to hear of other ideas (UPDATE which you can find in the comments).mailbox sorting, workflow, alphabetical, GTD, productivity, Mailbox Drawer, smart mailboxes, tips, mail.app, apple mailSimilar Posts:

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