This is a pretty interesting topic and something I’ve been thinking alot about lately. The divide between your analog and digital space, both need to be organized but both require different methods and solutions.

For Email, use Thunderbird, the open source email client provided by Mozilla.org

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

what’s really nice about it, is if you get the plugins Engimail and GNUpg you can send encrypted mail using entirely free and open source software.

http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download.html

http://www.gnupg.org/

Thunt http://thunt.net

http://www.backpackit.com/

voodoopad :)

Jesus, PC users shoud habe something like this also. I’m almost being buried by my to do lists!

Is there any nice PC based software to help me implement “Getting Things Done” methods?

I heavily use hogbay notebook for gtd. Don’t miss the very powerfull function to show and create columns.

http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/hogbaynotebook.php

I still use iCal, since it syncs to .Mac and my work machine easily.

I decided not to upgrade my Palm, because I realized that my excuse was to take my address book anywhere, and what I really wanted was an expensive toy. So, I print out my address book every so often and keep it in my car. I haven’t been using it long enough to offer a firm recommendation, though.

What I want is to be able to read the iCal calendar files without having to launch iCal, using Python (or C or Perl or whatever). If someone can point me to something like that, I’d appreciate it. I want to use it to write a program that tells me today’s and tomorrow’s to-dos.

I’m not about duplicating my to-do lists on my computer—I try to keep it analog as much as possible. However, my main problem at the moment is organizing my drives, folders, and such, deciding when and how to get things off the computer onto archival discs, and trying to automate things. I’m using Quatio Observer to tell me when certain folders get too big, etc.

I am slowly applying the principals of GTD to setting up a file system. Just because you can store an amazing amount of data doesn’t mean you should…

I think I must be one of the last few people left who’s still using OS 9 on a Mac G3 laptop! I’m using Entourage (and will continue to do so when I upgrade to a new Mac and OS X later!). I use its folders feature for each client I work with. Within that one folder I have 2 - one for work to be done/changes to current work and one for quotes/costings etc.I use the Calendar to prompt me for upcoming deadlines, meetings, to call, to email etc. I don’t use a PDA. I sold my iPAQ when I realised I’m a pen and paper gal, so all my notes and schedules are transferred between my Calendar and Filofax. I don’t think you’d need too many digital apps. Keep it simple. I find the stuff that my Mac has is enough to keep me and my design jobs organised. Folders are good.

“Keep it simple.” So true! My “big” accomplishment this month was finally cleaning out my inbox (450 emails strong!) and making folders and rules for everything (I had folders before but I needed much more than I thought). I then switched my view from “Inbox” to “Emails received today” and that, along with the “cunning use of flags” (thank you Eddie Izzard), has improved my emailing life 100%.

I like to use smart mailboxes for “auto” sorting my incoming email. Check mail rules under preferences.

I really like mail (in panther), because its main view amalgamates all my different pop/imap accounts in one view, and the rules let me sort out common mails (like mailing lists) into other folders.

ONE feature that’s missing, which I think they should have added, is a way to view all ‘flagged’ mails in any folder, in one list. That way, I can keep anything I think was very important in one folder, kinda like gmail’s ‘starred’ messages.

But I guess now that Tiger and mail 2.0’s out, I won’t see my wish granted. :(

I’d like to migrate to thunderbird, but it didn’t amalgamate my different mail accounts into 1 list (yet keep them separate at the same time), and there’s no ‘nice’ importer for mail->Tbird.

” I can keep anything I think was very important in one folder, kinda like gmail’s ‘starred’ messages.”

by that I mean one DYNAMIC folder… does mail 2.0 do this kind of thing? breaking the 1:1 r’ship bwn mails and folders?

starmonkey, couldn’t you use thunderbird and setup a rule to copy all incoming mail to a single folder, perhaps stored in local_folders? Of course you lose all the benefits of IMAP when doing that…

On the fairly complex solution side, there is an opensource tool called imap proxy that will allow you to connect to multiple imap (and pop3) mail sources on the server and present them to the mail client as a single imap feed. I’m on linux, but it may be possible to run it locally on osx to give you what you want…

Yes, Tiger’s Mail has “smart folders” that let you do what you want. You could create a smart folder whose attribute is “Message is Flagged”. Smart folders don’t store the messages like regular folders do, they just act as permanent queries for messages (wherever they are).