I’m always looking for better ways to organize my life which usually translates to “spending less time organizing and more time doing”. The amount of information you have to mentally gather when entering events, or to-dos is a unnecessary amount of mental work. Here’s some questions I ask myself every time I open iCal.

What day is it?
What’s the date?
Is this calendar I’m looking at the right month?
Is this week view?
Is this month view?
Is this yearly view?
What start time is this event?
What time does it end?
Do I even know what time it ends?

Here’s what grinds my gears, I know exactly when I want to input the event, and usually what time it starts. So why should I have to know the answer to 10 other questions, just to input a simple event. Can’t my app just figure it out for me?

Hmm.

The first thing I tried was opening iCal, and just searching for May 3rd in hopes that it would just jump to May 3rd, I could put my event in, and be gone. Nope, it legitimately searches all events for the text May 3rd, cool. So I said uh, I should write an applescript that does this. But then I remembered something…

Quicksilver.

I goto plugins find the iCal plugin, activate it, and invoke it. I hit period to type plain text, here’s what I wrote. “May 3rd 12:00 car install at audiomotion” hit tab, scroll down and find a “Create iCal Event…” and hit enter.

I open up iCal, half believing it would actually parse the info, and sure enough my event had been input at 12:00PM on May 3rd, without evening opening the app!. So using quicksilver you can input events without even opening iCal, just by knowing what time and day it is. How awesome is that?

I did note that Quicksilver parses the time in 24 hour time so sharpen up your math skills and add 12.

ps. If your a Windows guy reading this, then take all this in as an oppurtunity, can someone make something as extensible as this for windows? I would pay big bucks for this kind of tool, QS just happens to be free.