Getting Productive on the Mac
Posted Tuesday May 12, 2009 in Productivity
I’m a big systems guy: I think that, if you’re doing something repeatable and everyday, you should make it into a system that makes it easy to do over and over again without actually having to think much. I had such a system on my PC. Remarkably, despite the plethora of pretty brilliant task- and information-management applications on the Mac, it’s only now that I think I’ve gotten an equal-quality system on the Mac.
The key was actually something unexpected: the MacHeist bundle was expanded to include Delicious Library, which I’d coveted ever since I lent a special edition DVD to a friend and forgot which friend it was and never got the DVD, which cost about twice as much as a copy of Delicious Library, back. Since the MacHeist bundle had Delicious Library at slightly under retail cost, I went ahead and bought the whole thing. Little did I expect that what I perceived as an entirely un-needed bonus application would be just what the doctor ordered.
That application is The Hit List. I really only installed it because I didn’t want to lose the registration code I’d bought. However, it does have a very clever tutorial that’s hidden as the sample data in your to-do list, and I couldn’t resist that kind of clever.
The Hit List quickly showed itself to be just what I needed in a task manager. I’d used OmniFocus for the last year and a half, and had really enjoyed the idea of having a reliable repository for all of my to-do info that was also a great brainstorming tool. However, OmniFocus just isn’t a good day-to-day tool; it’s difficult to use it to get a clear idea of what you need to do today, as opposed to what you can do next. Working on my own, I, to be honest, rarely have time to get ahead, so what I usually find myself working on is what I need to do today.
That’s where The Hit List comes in. It’s got a great Today feature that lets you see what you need to do today, what you’ve already done today, and what’s coming up. It also has reasonably clever smart folders that let you selectively gather tasks; I use these to review what I’ve done and what’s coming up every week. These smart folders are either more powerful or at least more intuitive than OmniFocus’s views.
The Hit List also has a flexible tagging system that both supports whatever you’re likely to need to track and allows you to keep track of activities in contexts, if you use those. I like THL’s either/or approach to contexts vs. tags/categories, as opposed to OmniFocus’s strong emphasis on contexts, because I often find myself having a set of tasks that can be done anywhere, and should be done now, more urgently than any single-site tasks.
I can’t say enough about THL’s support for recurring events. The developer talked at length about how he figured out the UI for recurring events, and it works awfully well. OmniFocus, in contrast, does recurring events very badly, which makes it hard to keep track of important tasks like paying bills, taking out the garbage,1 etc. THL handles real life like that even better, although OmniFocus scores for its ability to make one task only appear if another is completed.
THL also has great tools to get information in. They’ve shamelessly cloned OmniFocus’s quick input window, which appears anytime you need it based on a customizable keystroke. Loyal THL users have also built a number of great tools to help capture information, such as one to create tasks from Web pages. By combining the brilliant (if poorly-named) MailActOn with this Applescript(with+added+Growl).scpt, you can easily add a task straight from Mail. (I also like to use MailActOn to file the e-mails for which I’ve created a task in a special folder that I sweep weekly, to ensure that I’ve processed and completed their task.) That should cover 80-90% of the way most users have tasks arrive on their doorstep.
In sum, The Hit List is a great little program that adds immensely to my productivity. Like most good Mac apps, it relies on other programs on the computer to complement it — in this case, I use Mail, iCal, Address Book, and Yojimbo to approach the functionality that Outlook2 has on the PC. But each component is either free or relatively inexpensive, and each is also really, really good at what it does. And that’s a hard combination not to like!
1 Just as important: bringing in the garbage!
2 Or Entourage or Daylite on the Mac.
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