Recently I wrote about tips to increase your productivity by applying some “Getting Things Done” strategies and I suggested To Do for managing your tasks from inside OS X’s Dashboard.
Today I found another tools that might do the trick even better.

Organized from islayer combines a note taking application, a calendar, and a To Do list manager within a single Dashboard widget.

It uses iCal’s database for storage, thus a task entered from Organized is available in iCal an vice versa. It also supports multiple calendars, so you can choose to list only your private or your professional appointments, or appointments from all calendars aggregated together.

It is labeled as version 1.0 — so it’s not a beta — but still lacks some essential features:
For example the calendar can only be viewed but not edited from within the widget (although you can easily do this via an iCal-link to that event).
It’s clearly a benefit over To Do, that you not only see your tasks, but also appointments, or notes. However, I still prefer To Do’s clean and uncluttered interface that can even handle huge task lists. Organized fails at this point, as long entries aren’t wrapped into multiple lines and the window can’t be resized horizontally.

I hope they fix that in an upcoming release. Leopard is required, by the way.

PS: The guys over at islayer also crafted the iStat series for monitoring your system’s load, memory usage, temperature, and other nonformation about your computer. Beautiful tools, but I find them unnecessary, as my MacBook has a unmistakable acoustic system load indicator… :-/

Via ma.gnolia.com social bookmarking.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2008 is just about to begin with one of the famous “Stevenotes” – Steve Jobs presenting new stuff from Apple and bringing light into the darkness of all the rumors floating around the web for weeks.

Zillions of Apple fans sitting in front of their computer and constantly checking for the latest news and updates are pushing websites and services like TUAW or Twitter to the limits of scalability.

Am I a fanboy, too? Maybe. I just took the test.

I guess that’s pretty low… at least for people who are taking this test :)

Feel free to check out your addiction to Apple.

By the way:
Just in case you don’t want to spend approx. 2hrs. watching Steve Jobs Keynote, here is a 60 second summary:

Let’s make it a productivity week. tuaw resp. Hawk Wings just spit out “Related Mail”, a very useful extension for Apple’s build-in Mail application.

Many of you will know David Allen’s famous book “Getting Things Done — The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”. It discusses a number of techniques that should help you to stay focused on your work and avoid being sucked into mental clutter and physical chaos.
Many of his tips are plain simple, but you have to adopt them into your daily working habits nonetheless. This is where the trouble begins.