jarango

Mac OS X Leopard and GTD

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the next version of OS X—Leopard—was presented today at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. There are some exciting new features in the new OS, including a great-looking backup app (Time Machine). However, I’m particularly excited about the new version of Mail.app.

Why? Because this new version of Mail includes two features that are particularly interesting to a personal productivity dweeb like myself: Notes and To Dos.
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Notes are special messages that show up in your inbox and in a special Notes folder. They seem fairly similar to Notes in Entourage (my current organization app), except for the “showing up in the inbox” bit. (And, as usual with Apple products, looking much better.)

To Dos, on the other hand, seem much more interesting. You can select any text clip or email message and turn it into a To Do, which stays in the context of the note it was created in—in addition to showing up in a dedicated To Do list view. This is cool; it seems very similar to the way I work when taking notes or brainstorming on paper. In addition, there is a single systemwide To Do database (much like addresses in Addressbook), so To Dos can be shared with other apps (eg. iCal).

If these are services provided by the OS itself (as the Leopard keynote presentation seems to imply), the possibilities for GTD-style organization are huge. For example, I’d love to be able to select an item in OmniOutliner or Textmate and turn it into a To Do, while keeping it in context. This seems feasible using this new feature.

I’m excited about this… if this is in fact how the new To Dos work, Leopard may prove to be the ultimate GTD OS.