I’m in love. Yes, with an application. Ghost Action is everything I’ve been looking for in a personal organizer:
- easy to use. I don’t think it gets much easier.
- I create Projects, for me these are typically client names
- I create Actions, ie. write blog post, edit site or interview Erin
- I give each Action a due date
- I create Contexts, mine are Write, Do, Meet or Delegate
- I sync it with my iCal
- good looking. It’s clean and simple and organized – the total opposite of my desk. And, the icon is a plump and friendly check mark, the world wide identifier that exclaims, ‘IT IS DONE!’ Just seeing that check mark makes me feel accomplished. (see icon above)
- made for Mac. Listen, I tried to have a PC for years and I only got frustration, freezing and restarts. Ghost Action was made for Mac…so it works just like everything else on my computer, looks like everything else and I don’t have to learn anything new. If any of you PC users want to guest post about a similar app for PC, send it along!
- syncs with iCal. As long as you put the @ sign before your iCal entries, they will sync up on Ghost Action. So now, I have a list of things I have to do in Ghost Action – divided by Context and Project, I also have a view of my to-dos in daily, weekly and monthly calendar form AND I have iCal popping up reminders throughout the day (basically kicking me in the pants and telling me to do what I have to do).
- has finder functionality. I’m pretty sure that Finder is my favorite function on my Mac because it doesn’t require me to remember where I put anything, I only need to remember the words I used to define said things. For instance…I just wrote a press release about kids cleaning up the beach…so I start typing in those words and everything on my computer that has those words, starts to pop up (and it prioritizes the listings in terms of word match and recent usage). It’s a beautiful function and Ghost Action does it too, so in this case, I can type in ‘press release’ and all of my press release to-do’s will appear – instantly.
It costs $19.95…less than a good day planner and more than a notebook filled with lists and scratch outs…and so much more useful, functional, infinite and productive than either or both of those systems could ever hope to be. Get it here.
Major props to Erin Anderson of Flexpaths for introducing me to my new best friend, Ghost Assistant.