The powerful combination of iCal, Mail, and Spotlight

Merlin over at 43 Folders has a great post for getting more out of iCal.

Of particular interest to me were his mentions of creating calendar groups and his advice for using the various iCal fields such as the notes field for tasks and events. It's excellent advice and something I've been doing for a while. Something he does not mention that I would like to add in to the mix are MailTags which connect iCal to Apple Mail as well as Spotlight in the Finder.

First, let me reiterate the usefulness of groups and notes. You can easily create groups of calendars by going to the File menu and choosing new group. If you are a practitioner of David Allens GTD you can create Groups based on contexts as Merlin does:

So, for example, I’ve put “email,” “web,” “design,” “print,” “google,” and “buy online” tasks into a group called “Computer.” When I’m planning for a time when I won’t be at the computer, I deselect one box, and a couple dozen tasks I can’t possibly do anything about just disappear. Print that list, and off I go.

Remember: whether or not you’re doing GTD, it’s valuable to always know what you don’t need to be thinking about at a given time.

That last sentence is great advice. Here's how I do it. I've created two groups which contain about half my calendars. The first is a Projects group and it contains a calendar for any active or semi-active project. I can see them all or hide them all with a single click in the checkbox for the group. I've also created a Remote group which contains subscribed calendars such as Family events and weather via wunderground.com (just do a zipcode search and you'll see an iCal link for your local weather). Again with a simple click and can see or hide these events.

My remaining calendars are not grouped and are generally left viewable all the time. I lead a fairly simple life so these don't tend to get too crazy: Personal, Birthdays, Family, TV, Work and Travel. I tend to watch very little television which is why I remind myself of the one or two things a week that I do want to see. Birthdays are fairly sporadic as is travel. Clients that are likely to be one-time events such as an OS X install go into the Work calendar.

One additional thought, it would seem that combining project and context organizing would be fairly easy by adding tags and using iCal's oh so nifty search field. If you are context oriented as Merlin is you could add a project tag to the notes field of your contextually organized calendars. If, like me, you are prefer to organize by project, just and a context tag in the notes field of tasks and events. Want to see all your errands? Use the search field to search for @errand to find anything you've tagged with "@errand". Best of both worlds.

Speaking of notes, use iCal's very useful notes field! In fact, use all the fields that iCal provides for events.

Let's start with the free form notes field and what you can add to it: Phone numbers related to the task or appointment. Any notes, summary of a related email, or full paste of an email (we'll get to MailTags in a minute). As Merlin suggests if this a task or meeting that is being scheduled far in advance you'll be happy to have a few notes to remind you of the purpose of this meeting or task. One last word about the text you place in the notes field, these are searched by Spotlight and we'll come back to that in a moment.

If you are sending this event as an iCal invite you may want to consider what may be useful for the recipient. Use the notes field to include a location address as well as a google or yahoo maps link to the location. You may also want to include notes for materials that may need to be prepared or brought to a meeting.

The Attendees field is not only useful for sending an invitation but if you print your calendar rather than carry a laptop you can include the phone numbers of everyone involved via the attendees field.

Use that alarm! Not only will iCal pop up an alarm for upcoming meetings. It gives you the option to send email or open files such as an invoice for a job event or a map. Your reminder thus becomes a prompt to print an invoice or any other related material for the event.

The url field can be quite handy for the above mentioned links to a google map to the event or, in the case of MailTags, a link to the email that prompted the creation of the todo. If you're using iCal and Apple Mail you really should check out MailTags. I've mentioned it before and will again in the future. This is a fantastic donationware plug-in that enables the creation of iCal todos which create an active link to the email. From the email you can create the to-do, make notes, set a due-date, and mark complete. Click the magnifying glass in the MailTags panel and you jump right into the todo in iCal. From iCal, any changes you make to the todo are actively communicated to the email tag and the changes are reflected there too. Very cool. Not only that, but you've now linked this email and iCal todo to Spotlight searches.

Think about that. Assuming you use MailTags and consistently tag your project emails, events, contacts with the same project keyword, you can now use the Spotlight search for a project keyword from the top right of your screen and get everything listed in one place. Be sure to use a unique keyword or combination of keywords together with no space and your searches will be that much faster and more accurate. Tag all project files with that unique keyword in the Spotlight comments of the file for even better results. One last place to tag would be contacts related to the project. Add the keyword to a contact's note field in the Mac OS X Address Book and the contact will show up in the Spotlight search.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, iCal, Spotlight, MailTags, Apple Mail.