Use Automator to Append from Anywhere!

It turns out that one of the hardest parts of accomplishing things is remembering that you wanted to in the first place. The productivity pros call this ‘capture’: the ability to catch your ideas and to-do’s whenever (and wherever) they occur. Now there’s lots of good ideas for systems you can use to achieve capture that’s as effortless and as universal as possible. For a while, one of my favorites has been the 43 Folders’ Quicksilver append trick.

What’s great about the append trick is that it lets you achieve capture without shifting away from what you’re already doing. That way, you catch your ideas without losing the thread of thought or getting too distracted from the work that brought you to them in the first place. Now, an obvious next step would be to figure out a way to have this same option available to you when you weren’t sitting in front of the computer.

Recently, a blog post on how to put your mac to sleep by sending an email gave me an idea for how to do it. I started working on an Automator action that would look for new emails from my phone with the subject line “todo” and append their contents to my master TODO.TXT file. Here’s a screen shot of the final action (it’s kind of long):

And here’s a more detailed breakdown:

1. Finder > Find Finder Items (give it the location of your todo.txt file)
2. Finder > Open Finder Item (set open with to TextEdit)
3. Mail > Find Messages In Mail (find messages, not mailboxes or accounts, set the Sender to your phone’s email address (mine was my phone number @ vtext.com, if you don’t know yours, you can find out by sending yourself a text message — you may have to explicitly set your spam filters not to catch this address, they seem to like addresses with lots of numbers in them) also, make sure you use the arrow to tell this action to “ignore results from previous action”)
4. Mail > Combine Mail Messages (this will output the email messages as text)
5. TextEdit > Filter Paragraphs (in order to avoid ending up with a bunch of ugly mail headers in your todo file, you’ve got to filter out a bunch of lines — I set up rules to return paragraphs that are not empty, and do not contain: “*”, and do not begin with: “SUBJECT”, “DATE”, “SENDER”, and “RECIPIENT”)
6. TextEdit > Set Contents of TextEdit Document (set the pulldown option to “by appending” so you don’t delete the whole contents of your file each time)

Now, all you’ve got to do is follow the instructions in the how-to-put-your-mac-to-sleep blog post to learn how to trigger this action whenever an email arrives from your phone and you’re good to go. With this system, you can get one step closer to never forgeting a great idea or an important responsibility again.

Tagged: automator, mail, append, quicksilver, 43folders, applescript, todo, capture, gtd