43 Folders

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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

How are you Mac folks doing reminders and structuring to-dos?

As of Leopard, I'm a transplant from Entourage to the Mail/Address Book/iCal/.mac combo. Over in Entourage for the past 7 years, I created a slick Zero Inbox system by using delayed reminders, using a cool combo of Applescripts that removed emails out of the Inbox until a time when I needed to deal with them. I haven't figured out a system yet in the Mail world.

I'd love to hear how you Mac GTD'ers are using timers/reminders to postpone to-dos until the time you need to deal with them. I'm intrigued by OmniFocus, but it doesn't seem to be set up to do timers; more, it looks like a way to order ones to-dos in the sequence they need to be done. It might work, to switch from a popup timer world, to just remembering to look at a list. But before I dive in to OmniFocus, I'd love to hear how others are dealing with their to-dos using the Mail/Address Book/iCal/.mac combo.

Thanks for any ideas.

WCityMike's picture

Re: How are you Mac folks doing reminders and structuring to-dos

I use Remind to handle my calendar; it is ever present on my desktop courtesy of GeekTool. (For more, see your very own 43 Folders -- Merlin let me do a guest spot.)

I use the Remember the Milk website for task management -- it is accessible by cell phone, Windows machine, Mac machine, and several other locales, and thus isn't bound to my home machine. And it does it extremely speedily thanks to a lot of Ajax.

As for popup reminders, you can also roll your own by writing a shell script that uses growlnotify to pop up your own message -- set to certain times as a cron job.

 
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