Recently in GTD Category

First and foremost, I'm not a fan of the dock. I think it's very distracting and takes up too much real estate. I happened upon a tweet by Shaun Inman last week about Mail Unread Menu and how he's using it so he can hide his dock. I've tried to adopt this practice in the past but was never really keen on the results. That is until now.

I followed Shaun's tweet over to loganrockmore.com and downloaded Mail Unread Menu which allows you to see how many unread mails you have waiting for you on your menu bar, switch to mail.app from the icon and has some nice configuration options. I played around with it and noticed the Logan also has an identical tool -- NNW Unread Menu for Net News Wire users. Click. Download. Sweet. Since I am in a habit of looking at the dock to see how many new feeds I had, I can now look in the menu bar and not rely on the dock.

After a few hours of using Apple+Tab as an app switcher I was completely annoyed by the huge icons. Not able to find a way to make them smaller (speak up if you can), I downloaded Witch. Witch lets you customize the appearance and icon size of the app switcher which was just what I wanted.

Combining these three apps, I now have a nice dockless workspace and can max out my windows with the extra real estate I've gained.

Now for a completely distraction free experience, I added Isolator to the mix. Isolator will cover your desktop and all windows except for the application in focus. Mapped to a hotkey I can quickly turn it off. It's currently in beta for Leopard users but seems to be very stable for me.

Ingredients
Mail Unread Menu
NNW Unread Menu
Witch
Isolator
Hide your dock!

Note: All these apps are great apps so if you like them, consider donating to the developers.

Caveats
I had an issue with using Mail Unread Menu's switcher to jump to mail.app where it would fire off one of my FastScripts that was mapped to the keys Apple + 1. Logan tells me that command + 1 is the same key combo that Mail Unread Menu uses to switch to mail.app. I changed my FastScript key combo and all is good.

I think It's been about three years now since I was first introduced to Moleskine notebooks. If I remember correctly, it was about the same time I adopted GTD and was reading 43 Folders regularly. They are sexy little notebooks available in a number of styles for writers and artists alike. Personally, I use the Moleskine ruled notebook for client notes and the Moleskine sketchbook for the obvious - sketches.

Personally, I think the plain black cover is perfect the way it is. However, engraveyourbook.com is offering engraving services for Moleskines. You can have the cover and spine engraved to your liking with either Helvetica or use an uploaded image.

If you are endowed with artistic ability, you can submit up to three images for consideration to be used as stock designs for the covers. Currently they have four stock designs available. I'm sure that will expand rapidly. In my opinion this is a cool idea. I doubt I would order one with a cover engraving but the spine would come in handy. And Helvetica is just as sexy as the Moleskine notebooks.

I've been using OmniFocus for many months; well since the beta started. It's a great GTD app and has a ton of nice features.

This week Anxiety, a new todo list app from Tom Stoelwinder at Model Concept was released. It's free, so simple, and it begs for my use.

Using Anxiety as a HUD for OmniFocus

I've got a lot of contexts and projects logged in OmniFocus and can't see migrating away from it. It works so why fix it. Last night I was playing with Anxiety to see how nice it syncs with iCal and immediately noticed that since it will sync my calendars and let me create new calendars directly from it's interface, it's got to work nicely with OmniFocus. And it did; beautifully and bidirectionally.

This is great for me because I can't stand desktop clutter and OmniFocus is a full featured app. It takes up a lot of real estate on my desktop. If I'm in the middle of something and want to check off a action that's been completed, I'd rather be able to do it quickly instead of jumping into OmniFocus. This is where Anxiety really shines now. Since Anxiety has a nice toggle on the menu bar, I can show it quickly, mark it as completed and go back to work. Or, since it's so small, I can leave it floating on my mostly uncluttered desktop.

OmniFocus Sync Preferences

In your preferences pane for OmniFocus, setup which contexts you want to sync with iCal calendars. Keep in mind any calendars in iCal that you already have and take advantage of them if you can. If you want them to be deleted in OmniFocus when they are deleted from iCal, check that option in the preferences. I didn't because I want them to show as completed for my daily review. Now when I check something off in Anxiety, the next time I snyc OmniFocus it get's marked as completed. Another added bonus is that anything new created in Anxiety will end up in you OmniFocus inbox. Schweet!

A big thanks goes out to Tom for a kick-ass little app!

Note: Reader Aaron points out that Anxiety is Leopard only and he is correct. It relies on Leopards new system-wide database.

As I mentioned last week Merlin Mann is now a member of the Stikkit advisory board. Merlin is posting some great how-to's on this great web app and it sounds like it may be a regular subject on 43 Folders. I've been using Stikkit for a while now and found some really useful tips in his first post. He's also posted a small cheatsheet to help you get the most of your Stikkits.

For all you Stikkit users and GTD fans, Merlin Mann of 43folders fame has joined the Values of n advisory board. Read more on it.

Update: Merlin's statement about his involvement is on 43folders.com today.

For those of you who use Mail.app instead of the other bloated counterparts but wish for the ability to tag your mail beyond smart folders, Indev has a very productive plugin for Mail.app called MailTags as a donationware download.

In addition to tagging, it integrates nicely with iCal for project support, due dates and notes. These features not only work with messages in your inbox, but also with your outgoing mail. Recipients will not see your tagged information, but it will be accessible to you. Spotlight searching is available to all Mailtags data; tags, notes, projects, etc. Smart mailboxes can be created based on any Mailtag criteria.

One of the nicest features I see in this is that you can create Mailtags based on rules. For example, you can set a rule to create a due date 1 day ahead for all mail coming from joe@joeblow.com.

If you are a GTD fan, this should fit in nicely with your workflow. It's well worth the download.

I will have to test this with MailSteward to see how it works or if it will save the data with my mail to the MailSteward database. I haven't seen any information on it's integration yet.

Over the past few months, I have been using kGTD, the excellent implementation of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" by Ethan Schoonover. You can grab a copy at Kinkless.com. I won't go into the features of the software. Ethan's done a great job of that, and if you're Mac-Nerdy like me, you've probably seen or used it already. 43folders.com has some terrific articles as well.

In my spare time, I have been working on a Ruby on Rails port of the app for me to use when I'm not in front of my powerbook. Someone expressed their interest in this web app today as a means to sync kGTD with a web-based version. I think the true context was to sync it with Basecamp. It only makes sense to me to open this up for discussion.

A very short list of my planned features:

• Obviously, syncing between the two will be a challenge and a necessity.
• All of the standard features; action lists, contexts, projects, due dates, etc.
• iCal integration
• Reminders
• An API so Ethan (if he has time) can script in a sync feature with the web app and possibly a konfabulator widget for those Windows users who stumble in.

What I would like is for any of you who are interested in using this app, or are currently using kGTD to let me know what features you envision to be included in the first version -- lets get creative about this. In no way do I plan on replacing kGTD, but building upon it to extend it in new ways.