Learn how to transform Microsoft Entourage into the ultimate GTD productivity system. Read the whole series to find out how.

Today’s installments cover the basics of how GTD methodologies can be integrated into Microsoft Entourage. I’ve broken it up into two parts to make it easier to read, but by the end of these articles, you will be able to set up Microsoft Entourage in a fashion that will work smoothly with GTD.

In later installments, we will get into the nitty-gritty of using AppleScript automation to further un-kink and streamline your workflow.

These articles assume you have a basic working knowledge of Microsoft Entourage, and are comfortable with creating events, tasks and projects, and can even edit your list of categories. If you need help with that, I highly recommend trying out the built-in documentation to get started.

Entourage and GTD

Under the Getting Things Done methodology, all of your actions are related to open loops, or projects, in your life. A project is simply any obligation that will take more than one action to complete. Those action are then categorized by “context,” where each context is a location or mode (e.g. Home, Office and Online might be common contexts you would work in) you must be in to complete the action.

Many actions are also delineated as “next actions,” which is to say that they are the next possible step to move a given project along. Similarly, some actions may be deferred until later (often because you’re waiting on something else to complete), and you may not want to see them in your actions lists.

The other (and perhaps most important) part of the GTD methodology, is the concept of keeping innumerable lists, and writing down everything on your mind into a trusted and reliable system. So we also need a way to store all manner of lists and other supporting documents in a way that we can rely on to retrieve the information effortlessly when we need it.

So how do these GTD concepts fit into Entourage?

Projects

Entourage has a built-in Project Center which is ideal for tracking projects. You can link notes, documents, tasks, events and emails to your projects, and view it all in one place. Projects can even be shared and collaborated on with other Entourage users.

Because it can be cumbersome to create new projects using the built-in wizard, we will use AppleScript to un-kink the project wizard and speed up project creation.

Some of the un-kinking scripts make use of suffixes on projects which are similar to the prefixes on Contexts. These will be covered in later installments of this series.

Contexts

As for contexts, that gets a little more involved.

Entourage’s Categories is where we will store contexts for our actions. But we may also want categories for our address book, events, and notes, but those categories are not contexts and we generally don’t want to confuse them.

As a result, we will add a prefix character of “@” to all of our context categories. So in the categories list, you will have, for example, @ Home, @ Work, @ Online, as your contexts.

Contexts may also be prepended with “+” or “=”, but we will get into that in a later installment when we look at the advanced AppleScripts for un-kinking Entourage.

Now all your other categories to keep your personal addresses separate from prospects or work addresses can stick around, and all your context categories will sort to the top of the list, making it easy to assign them to your actions when needed.

Actions

Actions = Tasks. Nice and easy. Every action needs to have both a Project and a Context-type category associated with it in order to be considered a “real” action. (Otherwise it will end up in your Inbox view, as you will see.)

Since GTD doesn’t recognize prioritization as a priority (excuse the pun), we will use Entourage’s prioritization scheme to keep next actions and deferred actions separated from other actions. A task with a priority of “High” or “Highest” is considered a “next action,” and a priority of “Lowest” is considered a deferred action, with “low” and “normal” priorities indicating a normal action.

Lists, Notes and other Supporting Documents

Entourage lets you store numerous rich-text notes in its Notes view. These notes can be associated with projects, assigned to categories, and even linked to tasks or events. This is an ideal place to store project-related notes and lists.

You can also associate files (of any sort) with Entourage projects by dropping the files into the Files “hole” in the Project Center view, or putting documents (or aliases) into the drop folder for your project. (Configurable from the project center.)

By collecting everything related to a project in one place, you can trust at all times that you have the documents you need to complete your project at all times. This is a huge contributor to peace of mind, and I highly recommend doing so.

Calendar and Email

Entourage can also support calendaring and email. Yes, there are better email clients, and (possibly) better calendars, but both work quite well once you learn their ins and outs.

While there is no reason why you have to use Entourage for more than just task and project tracking, its true potential is achieved through the integration of all these functions. By keeping your calendar and correspondence in the same program, you can have all the material associated with your projects viewable from within the Project Center.

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, read part 2 to find out how to actually go about setting this up in Entourage.

Next article in this series:Un-Kinking Entourage Part 2: Setting Up Entourage

Don’t have Entourage? TidBITS and Microsoft are holding a giveaway to get your own copy of MS Office 2004, go register!

Do you want to manage your tasks and open-loops/projects easily and automatically? Do you want the ease of use of Kinkless GTD with the reliability of a commercial application? Well, so did I. This is what prompted me to finally settle on transforming Microsoft Entourage into the ultimate personal productivity system. This is the first entry in the series, so read along, and keep coming back to find out how you can work Entourage to your best advantage.

I started out with the Getting Things Done methodology about two years ago. I was working through graduate school, as was my wife (she still is, I’ve got my degree), and I was swimming in too many things to do and not enough time to do it. Prompted by the numerous enthusiastic reports of David Allen’s book on some blogs I frequented, I jumped on the bandwagon. I read the book, loved the approach, and have been valiantly striving to become a ninja-grade practitioner of GTD ever since.

But see, I’m an efficiency wonk, and a major geek, so I couldn’t just do GTD, I had to find a system that would let me do GTD better! I tried some note taking software, index cards, notepads, outliners, wikis and full blown web applications of all sorts. I’m a geek and a productivity/efficiency wonk, so I was happy to do it.

Finally, after months of experimentation and getting on and then falling off the GTD wagon, I became a Kinkless GTD (KGTD) user.

Kinkless GTD has much to offer. Because it has the incomparable OmniOutliner Pro, It’s efficient, easy on the eyes, quick to enter data, and very extensible since it’s entirely comprised of AppleScripts. As a user, I spent no small amount of time extending what KGTD could do, and making it work better with Apple’s Mail program, export contextual tasks to my iPod, and more.

But as I fiddled and toyed with the system, I became disenchanted. While the base KGTD outline worked great, its interface with the rest of my workflow was, for lack of a better word, broken. This wasn’t Kinkless’ fault at all! The problems were resident in iCal’s poor handling of date stamps, thus rendering Palm synchronization (Clie sync, in my case) useless. Mail’s AppleScript dictionary, while robust, is broken, and renders many common tasks entirely impossible, including such necessities as linking an email to a task in a fashion that will withstand moving the email from one folder to another.

And as for Kinkless itself, it was just AppleScript, and that was a failing. If I forgot to press “Sync” in the toolbar every day, it didn’t update. If I marked a task with a date in one place, it might get another date from another location in the document. KGTD is good, but it isn’t bulletproof, and worrying about whether my task and project lists (the lifeblood of my peace of mind) would survive the next Sync was not contributing to a mind like water. And isn’t that the whole point of the GTD methodology?

So, I went back to the drawing board, but more knowledgeable about what I wanted or needed from a task manager. I came up with a simple list of requirements:

• Easy and ubiquitous entry of new information via LaunchBar, Quicksilver, or darn near anything else. I am hopeless addicted to the “Send to KGTD” syntax (which I extended in my own scripts), and I simply could not live without it.

• Able to categorize my tasks based on two axes: Context and Projects. While The David may be content with a separate project and task list, having the ability to view my tasks both by context and by project cuts half an hour out of my review process.

• Integration with email. I have set up a GMail account which creates tasks. If I’m away from my computer, I can send it a task, and it pops right into my task list. (Thanks to the Mail to KGTD script.) Same goes for an email that requires action; I want to send it to my task inbox or to a project, not let it clutter up my inbox.

• Portability, on either an iPod or my Clie. I need to have my tasks with me when I’m out and about. Then I can take use of those precious ten minutes of slack time when I arrive early for a meeting, and can take a couple calls. Furthermore, on the portable device, context must be maintained, or else I’ll be swimming in tasks.

As I looked over this list, I thought of software that could handle it. There were the usual crop of wikis and other hacks. There was the excellent Ruby on Rails application, Tracks. There was even one fellow who hacked GTD into his GMail account. But none of these had all the key features I was looking for.

_And then I thought, “Why not Microsoft Entourage?”_

Why Entourage? Well, because it handles categories as well as projects, thus keeping everything nicely in line. It also has a phenomenal AppleScript dictionary, which was well up to the task of replicating the Send to KGTD functionality I craved.

As I poked around in Entourage’s inner workings, I found that the program, bolstered by recent updates, had even more to offer. It is Spotlight searchable; it shares its schedule and contacts with Apple’s Address Book and iCal programs, thus enabling me to keep using other programs that rely on those data-stores; it syncs effortlessly with my Clie, maintaining categories with aplomb (and there’s tools to sync to the iPod as well); and its use of custom views and categories makes it easy to slice its information into just what I want to see at any particular time – the ultimate goal of the context-based GTD system.

Entourage also has its warts, it’s true. Its Project Center appears to be the answer to all of a GTD user’s dreams – a single repository for emails, tasks, files and notes related to a given responsibility – but it’s kind of kludgy in some ways, especially when it comes to creating projects. (A three step wizard is the only way.) But then, couldn’t I AppleScript a way around that limitation?

It turns out that I could, and I have started to do so. The results have been incredible. I have full confidence in my system and am spending less time than ever fidding with its workings. While I’m certainly spending some time scripting and extending the functionality of my system, the basics are all built right into Entourage, and are therefore well supported by everything else that supports Entourage.

So, for the next few days, I’ll be posting a series of blog posts, and putting up a few scripts (in early beta, at best, but don’t worry, none will harm your data – I made damn sure of that!), about how you can Un-Kink Entourage (a homage to Kinkless GTD, I assure you, and not poking fun), and turn it into a superb storehouse for your actions and open loops and even for the other random files which end up getting in the way.

This is all built on 10+ years of AppleScripting know-how, a deep appreciation for the finer points of organization, and a firm desire to put the best of Kinkless GTD into a more robust and automatic system. I welcome your comments and questions throughout, and will try to answer them directly in the comments section, but may keep some as grist for additional articles in this series.

And yes, I know, The David has his own guide to implementing GTD in Microsoft Entourage. But his costs $10 and mine’s free and comes with oodles of software. (Now might also be a good time to mention that I’m not associated with David Allen, the Getting Things Done book or concept, or anything else – I’m just an enthusiastic user.)

If you’re feeling adventurous, dust off that copy of Entourage, update it to the latest version, and join me on this wild ride to turn the corporate behemoth into a lovely and efficient task manager.

Next article in this series: Un-Kinking Entourage Part 1: The Basics

ThisService promises to turn any AppleScript or shell script into a live, working, entry in the much-ignored Services menu. And yes, it will take input text and do something with it, so your hopes of turning random selected text into, say, a note in KGTD (or something purple) can now come true.

It’s a perfect Halloween gift for the compulsive scripter in your family.

I just put together a custom AppleScript search engine, using Google’s new Co-Op vertical search. Searches my favorite sites and the AppleScript documentation to dig up the answers you might need.

Enjoy!

My favorite unixy scripting language has been married to my favorite all purpose Mac scripting language! RubyOSA provides hooks for Ruby to access AppleScript (a.k.a. the Open Scripting Architecture). This might keep me busy for a while…

The title says it all. I’m fed up!

I’ve been AppleScripting things for many years now, and I’ve come to expect some pretty idiosyncratic behavior from AppleScript. Sure, there’s the occasional application that won’t take “whose” or “which” and insists on “where its” instead; or the method that mixes up “true” and “having”; that’s part and parcel of the AppleScript English-like syntax.

But it’s gotten worse.

See, I’ve been trying to script Apple’s Mail application. And, well, it’s pretty damn near impossible to do.

Why? Well, because it’s broken, that’s why. Create an outgoing message, and it has no identifier! Try to classify an incoming message via a rule? Well, it doesn’t have an ID, either.

So, my plans to make a fancy new version of Mail to KGTD with MailTags support built-in, is sort of indefinitely on hold. (And I won’t belabor you with the problems I’ve had getting MailTags scripted, since I’m sure it’s just beta teething pains.)

Then there’s Kinkless GTD itself. It’s a wonderful productivity tool. Agile, responsive, entirely AppleScriptable (heck, it’s almost entirely AppleScript, itself), and a true work of hacker art.

But it’s broken, too…

iCal sync is problematic if you add a PDA to the mix (not Kinkless’ fault, just more of Apple’s broken software) and there’s some bugs which cause tasks to just disappear if you set your dates incorrectly.

And, again, I can’t seem to really get it integrated with Mail. Not cleanly, not easily. It’s a definite case of a square peg in a slightly clogged and not-quite-round hole.

I can’t help but feel that there’s a better way of doing this. Something that doesn’t try to build everything out of an outliner, without any real starting point. Something that doesn’t rely on Apple’s half-baked attempts at software…

Something just a little more… purple…

Andy Herbert released a bitchin’ (did I just date myself?) little bundle for TextMate, which takes any shell script you whip up in TextMate and turns it into a Dashboard widget. Click the widget, run the script. Easy as can be.

Widgets can show their output (it opens it up in Console.app) and can also accept dragged items (and pass them as a variable to the script).

Awesome tool for making something clickable out of a shell script. Perfect for the weird little utilities you need to run now and again. (Like my script to reload a crapped out Cisco VPN kernel extension when I forget to disconnect before sleeping my Mac.)

You can read about it here, watch a movie of the bundle in action or just download the bundle directly.

I got the following message in my RSS feeds this morning:

>Thanks for your interest in the Bastard Operator from Hell. Simon Travaglia, the author of BOFH, has asked us to remove links to his articles from our RSS feeds. We will not restore the BOFH RSS feeds without his permission.

BOFH (short for Bastard Operator From Hell) is one of many columns in The Register, an IT-related news site. I was a subscriber to a feed that only gave me the hilarious stories of the Bastard, and I enjoyed reading them.

My question is this: Why would Mr. Travaglia not want to appear in feeds? The feeds didn’t contain the full text of his columns, but really only served to send me to The Reg’s website so that I could read the latest adventure.

This is more or less like asking that clothing you design not appear in the latest Macy’s catalog!

I can only assume that Travaglia, for all his supposed technical brilliance, isn’t much of a marketer and quite possibly isn’t that interested in reaching readers. And, personally, I lament that I probably won’t think to check The Reg any longer for new articles. My news is in RSS, and I rarely venture out to visit other sites, especially ones updated as haphazardly as BOFH.

Despite all the crabby things I say about iTunes, I use it every day, and there’s a lot to like about it.

For example, iTunes offers some amazing ways to organize your music. You can rate it, you can build up albums, browse by cover art, and even create smart folders based on the year the tune was released or by the beats-per-minute of the song.

That’s great, provided that you have a team of data entry personnel getting all that metadata up to date, scanning Amazon.com for album art, and listening to your various mislabeled tracks to figure out what song it is and add the appropriate information in iTunes. But otherwise, you generally end up with some smart folders that track about half a dozen of your songs, and you kind of give up on the rest.

But hey, isn’t that what computers are for? Shouldn’t your Mac be able to handle all that tedious work for you? And for those tasks that it can’t do by itself (rating songs, for example, is an inherently personal task), can’t it make it easier for you to take care of it?

But if that were possible, wouldn’t Apple have built in into iTunes for you?

Apparently they didn’t (at least not all the way), so here’s a handful of utilities that will help you get your iTunes library into shape, and make the most of what you’ve got in there.

ID3 Tags

ID3 tags are all those funny little bits of information about your MP3 files. Things like artist, album, the name of the song, the track number, and even the beats-per-minute are stored in these extensive tags. So what’s a person to do to get them all updated?

Well, first you’ll want to check out iEatBrainz, a client for the MusicBrainz database. This program will analyze what your MP3 file sounds like and then suggest songs that it might be. It works remarkably well, and is just the thing for finding the information for that one track that’s just named “track1” that you love listening to, but don’t know the artist. (If you were alive during Napster’s heyday, you’ve got a lot of these files.)

For the rest of your files that are just missing proper tags, take a look at MP3 ID3X. This is a wonderful little utility that lets you batch tag your files, much faster and more powerfully than selecting more than one file in iTunes. Best of all, MP3 ID3X will let you tag files based on fragments of their file name, or based on the folder that they’re in. So if you have some untagged files in, say, a “Depeche Mode” folder, it can figure out that they should all have “Depeche Mode” as the artist. Nifty.

Cover Art and Ratings

What do cover art and ratings have in common? Well, these utilities all cover both.

iTunes can grab cover art from the iTunes store, which is awful nice, but there’s a lot of stuff that just can’t be found in the store. These utilities can grab album art from other sources, such as Amazon.com, or Google’s image search to help fill out your library.

Album Art Widget is a nicely put together Dashboard widget that grabs album art, and also lets you rate your songs while they play. If you want a little more power, you can install Yahoo Widget Manager (formerly Konfabulator) and pick up the iTunes Companion widget, which does everything Album Art does, and can also grab lyrics from the web and add them to your songs. Both of these widgets also let you control iTunes (play, pause, forward, back, etc.).

Another application, in the same vein, is Clutter. Clutter not only grabs album art, but also lets you clutter up your desktop with virtual CD covers, which you can use to play any of your songs. Not as tidy as iTunes’ new CoverFlow feature, but for some folks, it’s just the ticket.

But my favorite of all these utilities is the all-purpose iTunes helper, GimmeSomeTune. This program’s a bit hard to describe, since it does so much, but basically it adds a menu control which can control iTunes from anywhere (like the widgets), and pops up a little bezel-style window every time a new track plays, showing some info (user configurable) about the track. It can automatically grab album art, rate songs, and do all kinds of other things, plus it lets you bind keyboard commands to all of these controls.

Basically, it lets you control iTunes to the Nth degree, whether or not iTunes is open.

Taking it to the Next Level

So now you’ve got a nice customized iTunes controller, album art everywhere, and your metadata and ratings are all up to date. What’s next?

Well, first let’s get your tracks all set at the same volume. Yeah, iTunes has its “sound check” feature which kind of does that, but there’s a little program called iVolume which does a heck of a lot better. It’ll scan your library and set all your songs perfectly to the right volume, even taking into account album groupings (since albums tend to mixed at the same volume).

Then you might want to create a nice mix for, say, working out, and another for a mellow evening with the significant other. Say hello to a new beta app, Tangerine, which does an amazing trick: It tells you how peppy each of your songs is.

Peppy?

Well yeah. It tells you the beats-per-minute and beat intensity of all your tracks. So when you want a throbbing fast beat for working out, grab your high speed, high intensity music. For that romantic night, you’ll want something close to the opposite. (And then maybe a nice beat as a nightcap.)

Very cool trick, and it’s an amazingly effective way to put together a playlist.

Finally, if you want some more music, there’s a handful of ways to get recommendations. Check out Goombah, Mobster or TuneBounce, all of which promise to introduce you to more music that you’ll like.

So check out these utilities. Most are free, and those which cost money are quite inexpensive. Every one promises to make your iTunes experience richer and more satisfying.

I just installed IE 7 on my PC at work, and I thought I’d share my impressions after using it for an hour or two. I was trying to put this review into a “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” theme, but I found out that all I had was bad and ugly and one tiny shred of good. So we’re just going with The Ugly.

Is it just me, or is it the ugliest browser ever made?

Those tabs are HUGENORMOUS, there’s toolbars everywhere, and it’s all this kind of sickly blue color. Those giant jeweled buttons are absolute eyesores, too. Ugh. It’s like MacOS X’s public beta with all life sucked out of it. Garish and depressing.

It doesn’t even look like a regular application. More like some insane WinAmp skin or something. Just bizarre.

And can we talk about the UI? No menu bar, huh? Weird. Sure, you CAN make it show up, but it can’t be at the top of the window like in EVERY OTHER WINDOWS APPLICATION!

Then there’s some weird set of buttons which take up valuable tab space, and I can’t seem to MOVE that toolbar out of the way of my tabs even though there’s a little movey handle next to them (only right and left, bucko!), nor can I make them disappear using my contextual menu… How annoying. (Although I CAN delete all the items from the toolbar by customizing it.)

Bookmarks have been relegated to a strange pop-up tab sidebar thingamajigger. I guess they decided nobody likes bookmarks, because the Links toolbar doesn’t even show up by default. That’s a bad idea. Everyone at work puts ALL their bookmarks into the links toolbar and they’re going to be lost as soon as they upgrade.

If only there were some way to encapsulate all these many commands into a streamlined use of screen space…. Oh, I know, how about using a menu?!

The RSS reader looks like, well, Safari’s RSS reader. I don’t really understand it, either. It doesn’t really AGGREGATE feeds, it just sort of displays ‘em. All of them. Every article. Even ones you’ve read. I don’t get it in Safari either. Still, for what it does, it does it well and is not unpleasant to look at. I’m just not sure why it’s useful.

They’ve added links to categories in the feed, which is a sort of neat idea until you realize that you’d probably get a better experience just reading the site. (John C. Dvorak’s incredibly ugly blog notwithstanding.

The one innovation I can see (well, except that Firefox had it first via an extension) is the ability to see a largish thumbnail of every tab you have open. Unfortunately, since tabs quickly become thin and illegible, thanks to the useless toolbar/menubar replacement widget getting in the way, you’re going to need it. A lot.

Rendering seems pretty good. Still has trouble with pages that push the envelope on whizzy effects (click the images or the About button at the top for examples of what’s wrong, then try the same thing in a better browser), but it generally does well. Pages load snappily and render correctly. Of course, IE could always do that, despite its bugs, thanks to the tireless efforts of web designers throughout the world.

Still no spell checking. Drag. Every web browser should have that now, since every OS has some system-level service to provide it.

Apple’s simple and underfeatured Safari browser manages to beat it out in every respect except for compatability with retarded vertical market web apps (Lotus Notes webmail, I’m looking at you!), and Firefox or OmniWeb make it look positively pathetic. Forget IE 7 vs. Firefox 2.0, compared to Firefox 1.5, IE 7 seems dated (and ugly, did I mention that it’s ugly?).

All in all, I just have to wonder why it took so incredibly long to build this basically mediocre browser. It’s getting excited about features that already exist in basically dead-end browsers like iCab.