Omni recently released OmniPlan at a cost of $149, and iGTD is another popular offering, especially since it’s free. The problem I have with the whole GTD movement is that I feel like you spend more time organizing and categorizing and less time doing. Most of the applications I’ve looked at require a lot of time to enter tasks, place them in proper categories, customize the interface to your needs and simply living in the app to actually get any use out of them. You spend more time trying to help yourself be productive than actually accomplishing your goal of getting things done. Two things bother me about nearly all the GTD apps and Web sites out there. First, they require me to have the application open on my screen. Now if you have a 30” Cinema Display, that’s probably not an issue, but for users of laptops and desktops with a more reasonably-priced LCD, screen real estate is at a premium. Second, in most cases, they cost money. There’s a reason that for as far back as I can remember, the good-old-fashioned paper list or sticky-note has been the method of choice for leaving reminders and making lists – it’s simple, and it works. When you accomplish your tasks on the list, you toss them and they’re out of the way. Enter Anxiety by Tom Stoelwinder. Anxiety is a free to-do list application that brings the simple old-fashioned paper list on to your Mac. Anxiety is a single semi-opaque black window which displays your to-do items and is accessed either from a simple menu-bar icon, the Dock icon, or both. 
The to-do list allows you to enter tasks simply by clicking the check mark in the upper corner, selecting the calendar from the drop-down list, and typing your task. Once you have your task entered, it appears in the list along with a box to check-off when you’ve completed your task. That’s it. It’s simple and elegant. 
The reason you select a calendar from the drop-down list is that Anxiety integrates with Apple’s iCal and Mail applications (I use iCal). You select which calendar to add the item to via a drop-down list at the top of Anxiety’s window. Items I enter appear in my to-do list in iCal, where I have different calendars set up for Work, Home, etc. Double-clicking on tasks in the Anxiety list open the item in iCal where I can assign priority and due dates, set alarms and change which calendar the task appears on. All changes are automatically transferred to Anxiety. And you can adjust Anxiety’s preferences to either keep your calendars as separate windows you switch back-and-forth between, or display all tasks in one unified window. 
Because Anxiety is so simple, it doesn’t take up much screen-space, so you can leave it open at all times in the corner of your screen if you wish, or set it to hide when it isn’t active via the preferences. The only thing lacking in Anxiety’s preferences in my opinion is the ability to set a keyboard shortcut, but adventurous Mac users could probably set a keyboard shortcut up via Applescript. You of course don’t have to use this feature, but if you take advantage of the built-in applications Apple provides like I do, this is a nice bonus. Anxiety simply can’t compete with the more in-depth GTD applications out there, but it doesn’t try to – and that’s what makes it such a pleasure to use. It’s simple, looks great and keeps me on task without using my valuable time fussing with it, all of which allows me more time to actually accomplish the tasks to begin with.
