(Warning! Extreme Geek Content to follow.)
Is Mail 3.0 set to be a GTD killer app? I’ve been an OS X early adopter long enough to keep my expectations down-to-earth. Last night I paid homage at the Apple Store, got my free Leopard t-shirt and a copy of the new 10.5 system. Here are my first impressions of Leopard, Mail 3.0 and iCal 3.0 as a Getting Things Done system:
1. Installation of Leopard was simple. Unfortunately there were no clouds of angels singing the Hallelujah Chorus. In fact, there was not much of a noticable change to my desktop environment.
2. The implementation of Notes and To-Dos in Mail 3.0 is kludgy at best. Particularly atrocious is the use of Marker Felt Bold 16 as the default font in Notes. You can change this by going to Mail–>Preferences–>Fonts & Colors.
3. Right off the bat I noticed that Mail gives you no way to group To-Dos and Notes into projects, nor does it give you any way to tag them according to GTD context.
4. Mail 3.0 creates separate Notes and To-Do “folders” for each of your email accounts. This can get pretty cluttery very fast. As soon as Gmail IMAP is implemented I’m considering funneling all of my mail accounts there. This way I can create a series of mailboxes to manage contexts: @home, @work, @ errands, @someday.
5. Mail 3.0 may not ultimately be a good interface for GTD, but it still might turn out that To-Dos and Notes are helpful for processing incoming messages, and turning them into actions. iCal then becomes the tool for viewing Next Actions in context. (See Merlin’s tips for handling contexts in iCal.)
6. Some combination of the GTD tips from Johannes Verelst or the Getting Things Done with Mail and iCal by Hawk Wings are applicable to the current 3.0 implementation, although tighter intergration between Mail and iCal in Leopard undoubtedly makes things easier.
7. It might take a plug-in such as MailTags for Leopard to unleash the Getting Things Done goodness in the new release of Mail.