Seconding Brendon most heartily. This is a stupefyingly awesome post. I am still struggling with what I perceive as the defects of Mail compared to Entourage (except for bugginess, which is way worse in MS-land); so nice to be able to sit and contemplate the positive.

Do you really have that many items on your hard landscape, though? Errands? Calls? I mean, you schedule those things? I’d be dragging around my “brainstorm” items until they fractured into a million little ones and zeroes.

I get the feeling I’m missing the GTD gene. Oh, well. I’m going to print out this post and get on some of that learned behavior stuff.

Very ingenious and simple method of integrating the two programs. How do you assign the time period to per context in iCal. Could you possibly show a screen shot of how your iCal looks to get an idea of how it turns out?

Thanks

This is brilliant. I’ve been struggling with what stuff I have sync to iCal, and why, and how I use it. This is definitely worth looking into.

RIGHT NOW, I just sync my errands, calls, and “anywhere” contexts into a “contexts” group, primarily so that, in turn, they sync to my bluetooth phone (SE T637) and I can have them when I’m on the go and those are the main things I can do.

But I DO find that when I’m trying to tick stuff off in KGTD, I often get involved in syncing to update the display, reworking the projects, or getting stuff out of the inbox and into the projects, instead of staying in the “action framework”.

Obviously, this is partially a personal discipline problem, but then again, isn’t it all? But another big reason for this is that while I LIKE having some of the smaller, more specific contexts (ie sometimes i LIKE to stay in my “code” list while I have bbEdit and svnx open), that not having access to a SLIGHTLY wider context (design tasks that go with the code tasks, comps that need to go somewhere, etc.) is what makes me not “trust the context”, and go back to project view to see what “semi-related” tasks I’m missing JUST outside the current context.

This is where your “groups” plan really makes a LOT of sense to me.

AND, having iCal as my main framework for action definitely should help the discipline issue, as you’ve mentioned.

Do you then still have another group (or two) for hard landscape items in iCal?

Right now, I have 2 groups - one of items that are distinctly “MINE” (gigs, holidays, lessons I’m teaching, meetings, and appointments) broken down into a few separate calendars, and another group for OTHERS schedules that define my hard landscape and schedule planning (one for my GF, one for my roommate, one that covers my student’s big conflicts, one for when coworkers and my boss are out of town or otherwise unavailable, etc.)

Seems to work ok, and I can turn off other people’s input in one click.

As always, Thanks for sharing your approach!

This is just how I use KGTD, except that I also have a Treo, and I wanted to be able to tackle tasks while commuting. But there is a small, missing component in using iCal “to do”, namely identifying Next Actions on a per context basis. KGTD, in its current incarnation doesn’t differentiate Next Actions per context in iCal. To remedy this, I modified Ethan’s code by just a couple of lines, and now have KGTD set next actions as higher priority tasks in iCal. I expect that his next version of KGTD will do the same thing as well.

edit 2006-02-27 10:36:02 (mdm)

Here’s the link for Conrad’s change to the code

And thanks for asking, C — happy to add this in.

Heh. Patience, Conrad. ;-)

I don’t want to pre-emptively burgle Ethan’s thunder, but I’ll just say keep an eye out — kGTD is about to get even better. Like “wow” better.

S’all I’m saying.

Hello communicatrix… Let me reclarify:

I’m using iCal in two different ways.

1. Hard Landscape: these items aren’t going through KGTD, and are the two groups I defined towards the end of my post:

   • My Landscape, that includes scheduled meetings, gigs and lessons (I’m a part time musician after my full time design/PM job), holidays, appointments, holidays, et al.
   • Others: includes cursory hard landscape items for my Significant Other, my roommate, coworkers, and students- for reference, but disabled in a single click when I want to.

2. TO-DO Management- KGTD

   • I had a separate group, “CONTEXTS”, but will slowly be migrating to something similar to what Merlin outlined above. I don’t really have any actual calendar items here- just to do items (some of which do have start or due dates and alarms) organized one-calendar-per-context. These are synced with, and generally originate in, KGTD.

The separate calendars are still useful for filtering purposes, as your to-dos are color coded and disappear/reappear just like calendar items as you turn different calendars, and, per Merlin’s solution, GROUPS.

You can check off, and even create, to do’s in iCal, but you can’t really edit them or deal with them on a project basis - that’s reserved for working in OOPro/KGTD. SO: your forced to just work through your context lists. AND, as I mentioned before, you can turn on and off calendars to make your current visible “context” as wide or as focused as you need.

Does that help?

ugh- sorry all, I used numbers and bullets for that response for communimatrix, and apparently tripped off some fun formatting. It kind of works, but isn’t exactly what i intended. :)

Learning always comes from surprising directions: iCal GROUPS?! Geez, I’ve been using iCal forever but never noticed the group feature. Makes my day.

Oh, and the rest of the stuff very useful too. Groups…who knew…

I use that approach, using iCal like a window to watch my next to-dos. The problem is when creating a new to-do, I always have the some doubt: it should go to iCal, kGTD or both? Do I synch kGTD or not? I have found myself synching kGTD just before adding a single to-do. That’s not efficient, and the end result is that I am reluctant to add them. Any ideas?

Ditto what waywest said.

Group?! News to me. Cool.

At the very least, this is a good way to manage the calendars I’ve subscribed to. Put them all in one group, and —Boom— I can turn them all off at once.

Neato.

I’m a kGTD vet but I am baffled as to how you got your contexts to sync as individual calendars in iCal. Care to share?

OK, nevermind. I figured it out… RTFM, Berko.

Now, it would only be too awesome if my iPod would display tasks by calendar as it will appointments… Just another indication that iPod is not the new Newton.

Another solid kGTD enhancement post, Merlin. Thank you.

I’m new to kGTD, and am still getting the swing of things. Does anyone know of other kGTD Quicktime tutorials other than kinkless’?

Thanks,

Matthew

I like ‘potentially procrastinatable’ and ‘doing-to-fiddling ratio’ — time and time again, they are the crux (cruxes? cruxii?) of the matter.

Merlin, it looks like you have sub-folder calendars in ICal. Is that so? If so, how do you do that? Or is that KGTD? Please post a screenshot?

Wow this looks efficient, I’m truly jealous of you mac owners. It makes me want to switch even more! I guess I’m still a little afraid of switching and plus I’m currently broke at the moment haha. great post though! Now i know where to go if one day I get a Mac (I’m drooling over the new Macbook Pros).

Lemme just make sure I’m getting the method here: you put all your contexts into the “sync to iCal” preference (whatever it’s called) instead of just the “errands” stuff that you’re expecting to sync to a device and carry with you?

@terrym: cruci

Reality Bites,

Those sub-folder calendars are regular calendars in groups.

Make a new group and drag your calendars into it.

[…] Dr. Contextlove or: “How I stopped worrying and learned to love iCal” | 43 Folders Merlin’s genius idea: use kGTD to manage projects, iCal to manage tasks in context. Looks cool! (tags: gtd kgtd ical) […]

[…] I am be insufferable GTD dilettante  this is what I usually browse read at 6:00 am on most days. Its significance has increased manifold recently considering the sudden influx of new projects professionally and also the freelancing bit invoked the need for enumerating contexts. Obtain the information from the expert.Here is Dr Contexlove’s prescription for loving iCal with reference to organizing contexts. […]

[…] Dr. Contextlove or: “How I stopped worrying and learned to love iCal” (tags: gtd mac reference toread ical) […]

You are all high-level mac users so I hope you will give this a minute - it’s offtopic, but I do want to implement exactly what this post is about - using kGTD with iCal. I have called Apple and been to the dot-mac boards but no help. Here goes:

On Tiger, I used to happily sync my iCal at home, work, and laptop through iDisk. Happily! Once I upgraded to Panther, nothing worked. I can’t sync iCal, nor bookmarks, nor contacts - but let’s just discuss iCal for now. I tried loading a new driver for iCal, but the machine would not accept it. Yes, I have the up to date OS (10.4.4) Panther on all three machines. The error message says I should be loading ‘clean data’ onto the iDisk. I am willing to lose all my calendar info if I could get all three machines to sync. An ideas? Please use GUI language - I’m not a coder.

So I tried having all of my todos in iCal. Works fine. I can toggle them all off and then toggle on only the “writing” context for instance. That gives me the 4 things that I have to do in that context.

The problem is that I can’t check off the actions as completed from within iCal. I check the checkbox and the status doesn’t get propagated back to kGTD. Similarly with adding a todo. To do items added to iCal just get wiped out on the next sync of kGTD.

Am I doing something wrong?

Karen, I’m not an iDisk user, but I’d suggest that you just delete all of your calendar data from your iDisk and start over.

Hey, Ray,

You’re probably experiencing a bug of kGTD .7 (that I was having too). I’m happy to say that it is fixed (in spades) in the .8 version — which is apparently not too too far off from release. But I promise you it’s def. worth the wait.

This makes me wonder if there’s a way to automate other actions. For example, at 10 till 5, my web browser launches a traffic report, so I can know what the traffic will be like before I go home. (I’m not the kind of person who thinks to do that sort of thing before leaving work.) Any ideas out there?

Ray, Thank you. I don’t know how I missed (or lived without) that feature!

Lemme just make sure I’m getting the method here: you put all your contexts into the “sync to iCal” preference (whatever it’s called) instead of just the “errands” stuff that you’re expecting to sync to a device and carry with you?

** I don’t think that ques was answered before, so I am reposting it.

Thanks Dwayne

Merlin, When I follow your method adobe to sync to KGTD and Ical a new untitled calendar is added that I cannot delete, any suggestions?

Dwayne