iCal as a GTD Tool

(image borrowed from appeinside.com)

Why?

• See what GTD is all about. But basically its a set of guidelines that helps you be more organized and consequently more productive(they call it Getting Things Done), this is specially useful to check out if your work feels chaotic at the moment.
• I don’t follow it too strictly, but i do use it a lot.

Tools

• Before iCal I was using Things app, but it went recently into paid version. iCal in Leopard improved a lot so i decided to give it a try.
• I did try and use for while other GTD apps: iGTD, Chandler, and couple more… but was not fully happy with them.
• After a few months of using iCal, its working well for me.

iCal makes it simpler

• Because I was already using iCal for the Calendar, doing the TODO list management inside iCal removes the need of having another app getting in the way.
• Don’t have to worry more about sync problems between another app.
• Create TODO’s directly from email, natively.
• Is altogether more integrated into OS.

myCalendars in iCal

Work:

• work-now
• work-later

Personal:

• house
• others

Mail:

• inbox-tasks

How i use them:

• work-now and work-later are the ones that get more frequent daily use.
• work-later is for TODO’s that I won’t do now. Either i’m waiting for something to be able to finish it or only needs to be done in some days.
• Tasks that are not to be done right now go into the work-later, this way the work-now list gets less cluttered and I’m mostly looking at the work-now list.
• When i have the work-now list empty I go into the list of work-later and move the ones with higher priority into the work-now list. Also check the ones in inbox-tasks.
• I normally create a TODO item either directly into work-now calendar or from the Mail.app and these go into the inbox-tasks, that i review later on.
• When creating TODO items, I use a name format like “proj1: todo1”, “proj1: todo2”, this enables to sort them by name, because sometimes is better to do in batch several tasks from same project.
• When creating an item I also set its priority. Priority is another way to sort TODO items. This enables me to see what TODO’s need to done first.
• Some TODO’s can’t be done now(thus should go into work-later), but because i want to remember them before deadline, I drag and drop them into the calendar, create a remember alarm and then move them into the work-later.

• Use the TODO item “note:” to keep the relevant details about the TODO item. Basically the description of the TODO item exist here: description of the task, plan how to tackle the task, code repository revisions, URL’s to bug, etc etc..

• I keep iCap app open all day and use it to guide my work: I look what’s on work-now list with higher priority, pick the first, check if other any tasks can be batched with it, do it and finally tick it off when done.

• ICal Settings: un-tick the “Show all Completed Items”, so that when a task is done it disappears from the list.