Ivan’s agile thinkings

I’ve recently been thinking about my personal effectiveness and productivity.  I recently read through (most of) Dave Allan’s “Getting Things Done” and following a little Googling selected Entourage as my GTD centre.

Entourage was the easiest default choice for work.  I take my personal Mac to work and have to deal with Exchange: Entourage just works.  I have been having reasonable success with the Project Center and feel like I’m getting more things done (and the more important things too).

Not everything is great with my set up.  I have improved certain things mainly by adding some useful apple scripts to create tasks, events and messages from the current selection using shortcut keys.

Unfortunately, Entourage’s tasks don’t make it into to Exchange so they can be synced directly with my iPhone (like my calendar and mail).  This led me to sending myself emails to remind me to set up new tasks when processing my inbox.  So another googling and experimenting session followed.  Finally I came up with something that looks pretty promising.

Solution Overview:

1. Use Entourage’s (2008) standard sync mechanism to get Entourage’s Calendar and Task information into iCal.
2. Install Todo on my iPhone to show me my tasks on-the-go
3. Use Appigo Sync to get the todo items in iCal into Todo and back.

Detailed steps:

1. Step 1 is simple enough. In Entourage select the ‘Entourage -> Preferences’ menu.  Select ‘Sync Services’ and ensure the middle option is ticked ‘Synchronize events and tasks with iCal and .Mac’.
   Once this is done, wait a couple of minutes for your data to appear in iCal (note the new ‘Entourage’ calendar that has been created).  Note that we aren’t really interested in the Calendar, but to do items are synced along with the calendar.
   
2. Install Appigo Sync on your Mac (10.5+)
3. Download ‘Todo’ from the iTunes Store for $9.99 (make sure it’s ‘Todo’ by Appagio, Inc.)
4. Follow the following instructions to connect Todo to Appigo Sync: http://www.appigo.com/appigo-sync/faqs/connecting-todo

And you should be done – Entourage tasks should flow, via iCal, into Todo on your iPhone and back.  And it all looks pretty good at the moment.  Note that Appigo Sync only works over the same WiFi network that your Mac is on, but my iPhone is always with me – and my MBP isn’t really ever too far away.

The next thing is to see if Contexts and Projects can be made to play nicely from both ends.