There are dozens of time/task/project management applications for the Mac, iPhone, and iPod touch. I really like Things for powerful task management. It’s expensive, but performs beautifully. However, I tend to use Things for home or personal tasks, not so much for work-related time management.
To manage my list of to do items at work, I depend on iCal. I use traditional events and daily appointments in the main calendar to do this, but I also use iCal’s “To Do Items” pane. Many people don’t know about this feature, so I thought I’d describe it here.
To use To Do Items, open iCal and click the thumbtack icon in the lower right corner of the iCal pane. A sidebar will open; this is where to-do items are arranged in a list. There are several not-necessarily obvious ways to make a new to-do item. I simply hold down the Command-K keys at the same time (the Command key is to the immediate right or left of the space bar). If you’ve right-click enabled on your Mac, can also right-click inside the to-do pane to create a new item. Finally, you can create a new to-do item in iCal’s menu bar under File > New To Do.
Here’s a cool tip: you can drag text from Mail, Safari, or most other documents directly into the To Do Pane, where it will become a new to-do item.
Also, in Snow Leopard, new to-dos created in iCal will automatically show up in Mail’s list of to-do items. Likewise, to-do items created in Mail will show up in iCal. And when you highlight text in the body of an email, that text can be turned into a to-do in iCal. Very cool and useful for creating instant to-dos.
Note that even if you have multiple calendars, all to-do items are displayed in a single list in the To Do Items pane.
Once you’ve created a new to-do item, there are several ways to manage it. You can click the bars to the right of the item to give the items low, medium or high priority. You can assign to-do items to individual calendars by dragging them from the To Do Pane and dropping them onto the iCal calendar of your choice. You can also Right-click or Control-click on to-do items and assign it to a calendar from the contextual menu that opens.
To-do items can be sorted by a number of criteria, which can be found in a menu at the top of the To Do Items pane. From this menu, you can also set preferences for when to-do items are displayed.
Note that a to-do item is different from an appointment in iCal. Appointments don’t show up in the to-do list, and by default, to-do items don’t show up on the main iCal. However, you can easily turn a to-do into an appointment, or assign a date to a to-do item. Simply drag the to-do item from the To Do Items pane and drop it onto the day of your choice in iCal. From there you can manage the to-do just like a regular iCal event—turn it into a repeating event, invite people to it, create alarms, etc.
You can read an iCal 101 Article on Apple.com by clicking here.