Add Tasks to Things on your Mac from anywhere…
Like many, I recently had the urge to organize my life. I decided this time I would be serious about it and enlist some GTD apps to assist me. From the collection of apps I tried, my favorite was Things by CulturedCode. There are many features I love about this app, but one feature I wish it had was the ability to email myself tasks. This was something I really liked about RTM. I don’t have an iPhone yet so I wanted away I could add tasks on the go or from work. I decided to create an Applescript that would take specially formatted emails that arrived in Mail.app and convert them into tasks within Things. The subject line becomes the task name and the content of the email becomes the notes associated to the task. This is how I did that…
1. Copy this script to /Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts/ or paste this code and save it there as things.scpt Download things.scpt here…
2. Next, add a rule named Things to Mail.app to run this script when the email arrives. I personally chose to add an @ symbol to the beginning of the subject line to let Mail know to convert it in to a task. This works fine for me since I never get emails that begin subjects with @ symbols. But you can choose any symbol or criteria in your rule just as long as it runs the script. I also chose to mark it as read and the script moves it to the trash since I don’t need these tasks cluttering up my inbox.
And that is it! Now emails that come in matching the criteria will quickly be converted to tasks and dropped in to the “Inbox” in Things. Oh, and this script uses Growl Notifications! So if you don’t have Growl yet, be sure to download it to use this script to its fullest potential.
*UPDATE: Snow Leopard users may have to remove the line move thisMessage to mailbox "Trash" in the script if you are having trouble getting this to work. Thanks for the feedback Brian.

