I’ve been using iDoneThis for a few months now. It’s a simple service that emails you daily and asks “What’d you get done today”. It then keeps track of them all on their website in a calendar. They also mine your data for you to generate graphs and a word cloud. You can also enable daily emails reminding you of what you got one 1 week/1 month/1 year ago. Anyway,the problem with the daily email is that by the time I get the email I forget some things I’ve done. You can add items as you do them by sending an email to today@idonethis.com, but launching mail manually and creating a message is tedious. Thus the simple Applescript below. I have this assigned to a hotkey, but you could also save it as an application (and keep it in your dock).
set doneThis to text returned of ¬
(display dialog ¬
"What'd you do? " with title ¬
"iDoneThis" default answer ¬
"" buttons {"I Done It!", "Cancel"} ¬
default button 1)
if doneThis is not "" then
tell application "Mail"
set MyEmail to make new outgoing message
tell MyEmail
set content to doneThis
set subject to "A new thing I did today"
set sender to "YOUREMAIL@ADDRESS.COM"
make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:"today@idonethis.com"}
send
end tell
end tell
end if
Update 5/1/12
iDoneThis emailed and asked that I make this in to an application. I’ve made a simple application that’s made to live in your dock. You can quit it if you’d like, or leave it running. Each time you click the icon in the dock/switch to the application it will ask you what you’ve done, you can enter it in and press return or click “I Done It!”, it will then send off the email in the background. If your iDoneThis account isn’t setup using your default Mail email address you can change the email From address by launching/activating the iDoneThis application, then press “Cancel” on the dialog that pops up, then go to the iDoneThis menu select Preferences.
Update 5/23/12
Thanks to James Wang who made a few changes in order to support Teams! I’ve included these changes in the source and application linked below.
Download Source (Cocoa/Applescript)
Thank you very much for the app!
It’s small & lightweight, it really works!!
You really awesome for making this app 🙂
Brill! As soon as I signed up, this is exactly what I looked for, and for the exact same reason: by the time I get the email, as you said, I’ve forgotten some of what I’ve done. Thanks so much for making this script and, in turn, making the app!
This is excellent. Thanks so much.
I have always kept a big daily diary making meticulous notes of everything I do. This is really a refreshing change. Though I still use the diary, and refer to it when doing my end of the day email to iDoneThis.
I love ultra simple useful apps like this and this seems to be working really well, and it’s just three or four days.
Thanks, and good luck! Maybe you’ll live in the room next to Evernote!
Howard Stein.
Thanks very much.
J
Thank you so much for making this.
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Thank you.
This is actually VERY easy to do by simply using Automator in your Mac.
You just need 3 actions:
* Ask for text (I just use a message like “Which task did you finish?”)
* New Mail Message
* Send Outgoing Messages
For those of us who simply forget to write things down, simply create an entry in your cronjob to open your Automator .app file every few minutes/hours:
*/5 * * * * open /Applications/Email_to_iDoneThis.app
FYI: That cronjob will run your Automator workflow every 5 minutes.
Presenting at conference on productivity tomorrow and idonethis.com is a major talking point. Love it and thanks so much for the new App! Makes using the computer fab easy. Had to figure out to change the default address to my own at idonethis though so suggest you add something to the dialog box?
Love this app! It’s so simple and easy to use. I did notice, however, that when I update the “From” email address, the app continues to use my Mail default address. I tried saving my email address, then quitting the app and reopening to restart it, but no dice. I have OS X Yosemite (10.10.2 ).
Thanks!
thanks so much for this. i’m not a Mail user and this launches Mail everytime i use it. anyway to change my default email app to Postbox?
Hi Angel. I just started using Postbox myself, but I haven’t had a chance to update this script. Sorry about that.