Wise Startup Blog

Getting things done or GTD is really helpful in making working at a startup manageable, while also keeping me sane. Now there is an option for syncing TaskPaper with your iPhone 3G or EDGE.

I use a number of different elements on my mac from iCal to IMAP mail, and recently I’ve been using TaskPaper to help keep me organized with different tasks and projects.

Sync TaskPaper with your iPhone

TaskPaper is a simple text editor that allows you to organize your projects and tasks via bolded sections for projects and hyphenated sections for tasks. Within tasks and projects, you can use tags to organize information further, for example I use @work and @personal to differentiate what I need to do in my life as well as at work.

Taskpaper is a great solution, but I was having issues synching up taskpaper with what actually goes on. Say I go home and buy groceries, and complete that task, I have to wait until I get back in the office to actually mark it as completed. That may sound like a small inconvenience, but when you have so many things going on, spending double-time doing these sorts of things can turn into big time-wasters.

Luckily, the guys at hogbaysoftware have a solution to help you sync taskpaper via IMAP and subsequently also your iPhone.

What you have to do is create two apple scripts (just type in script in finder to find the appropriate application) and paste the code below into the scripts. Save the files in your taskpaper scripts folder, mine is: user/Library/Application Support/Taskpaper/scripts

Call this file “Send to Mail.scpt”

tell application “Mail”
check for new mail for first account
set newtasks to content of first message of mailbox “Drafts” of first account where subject is “Todolist TaskPaper”
end tell

tell application “TaskPaper”
set text contents of front document to newtasks
end tell

Call this file “Send to Taskpaper.scpt”

tell application “TaskPaper”
set tasks to text contents of front document
end tell

tell application “Mail”
check for new mail for first account
try
set olddr to first message of mailbox “Drafts” of first account where subject is “Todolist TaskPaper”

# delete doesn’t work
move olddr to mailbox “Trash” of first account
end try

set newdr to make new outgoing message with properties {visible:false, subject:”Todolist TaskPaper”}
tell newdr to set content to tasks
save newdr
close newdr
end tell

Once you’ve saved the files, to active them, pull up Taskpaper, and click on the script in the top menu. To send your tasks to Taskpaper, click on the “Send to Mail,” and to pull in tasks, click send to Taskpaper. Now, to access your taskpaper anywhere, pull up the drafts folder on your iPhone and edit away.

Sync is the key app for notes and productivity. You need to be able to keep your Taskpaper todo lists that you use on your computer in sync with your iPhone that you travel around with all day long. You can also check off and remove tasks that you complete while you’re out, and have the results synced on both your iPhone and on your iMac or Apple with Taskpaper.

Enjoy!