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.

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.

There are some widgets that are plain simple and super-useful. Minutes is one of them.

Minutes is a nifty countdown timer that alerts you at a specific time (e.g. 18:31) or after some period of time has passed (alert me in 7 minutes).

With just a few clicks you can control what should happen when the time is over: Launch an AppleScript or Application, start a playlist from iTunes, or just play-back an alert-sound.

This is one of the very few widgets where running multiple copies might make sense: One for tea, one for pizza, and one for the laundry. Of course you can choose between four different color sets to distinguish your clocks.

What’s missing is just a little button to postpone an alert for five minutes…

The OS X Dashboard (and all similar implementations for Windows, Unix, ...) is great for little tasks like looking up a word in a dictionary, or doing simple calculations with a calculator.
Regrettably the calculator widget shipped with OS X 10.4 is really bad. It doesn't honor the regular order of operations, thus entering 1+1*2 leads to 4 instead of 3, and it's very limited in functionality.

I just picked up PEMDAS as a powerful replacement. First of all it honors the order of operations and calculates the way you expect it to. Additionally it offers a wide variety of commonly used functions like square root, sin, log. You can also define variables and use them afterwards.

Screenshot of PEMDAS

It also supports different numeral systems like binary, octal, decimal. Unfortunately you can't mix non decimal numeral systems with scientific notation.

Anyway: It's great and you should give it a try.

Update: I just read that REMDAS received an Apple Design Award this year.