GTD

Mark E-mails in Mutt as Tasks in Taskwarrior

January 25th, 2010  |  Published in GTD, Tutorial

OK, so I think most people know that I have grown quite fond of Taskwarrior for managing my Getting Things Done stuff. Many of you might also know that Mutt is my e-mail client of choice, for the past 15 years. Recently you saw a post on Planet Ubuntu by the rockstar Bryce Harrington concerning Mark emails in mutt as tasks in gtg. Well, I have had something similar, actually pretty much the same damn thing, just with a different GTD application. So without further ado, here is what you need to do in order to mark an email in mutt as a task in taskwarrior.

Setup Mutt Macro

macro index t "<pipe-message>mutt2task<enter> <save-message>+TODO<enter>"

What this does is set the t key, while in the index of mutt, as a macro. The macro pipes the email message to a script I wrote that strips the header from the message and adds that as a task. The save-message part saves the email to my TODO folder.

Setup Mutt2Task Script

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/task add +email E-mail: $(grep 'Subject' $* | awk -F: '{print $2}')

What this does is call the command task add which adds a new task. The +email tags the task, and the E-mail: $(grep ‘Subject’ $* | awk -F: ‘{print $2}’) greps the Subject line and then prints the part after Subject: from the email, therefor just giving me the subject text. Make sure you place this script somewhere in $PATH and make it executable.

Make sure you add a TODO message folder in your mutt configuration so you can see the TODO messages.

Getting Things Done

September 24th, 2009  |  Published in Dear Lazyweb, GTD

These days I seem to be getting busier and busier, however where I am getting busier and busier is not all in the same spot. I have the various projects I work in (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, KDE), consulting type stuff, my new cycling life, and various others. For the past few months I have been trying to get things done, and it just doesn’t seem to work for me. I have tried tool after tool, and none of them are my cup of tea at this point. The ones I have tried are:

  • Tomboy
  • todo.sh
  • Tracks
  • Remember The Milk
  • Basket (there is a KDE 4 version coming which is kind of nice)
  • and various others…

Which one do you use and why? Do you use an online one like Evernote or such? Tiddlywiki or derivative (if so, how do you sync it all up among multiple machines easily?). Right now, when I am sitting at my desk, my whiteboard is my favorite way to keeping track of things, however I am not always at my desk. I have a bunch of machines, all running Linux of course with most running KDE (GNOME and Xmonad are the others). I have a Blackberry Curve that I use a lot as well. Any pointers? Thanks!