Most of the time having anxiety is a bad thing or so we’re told.    From what the doctors say (and research seems to support them on this) anxiety can lead to a whole host of problems from high blood pressure and heart disease to troubled sleep, sexual performance issues, and even accelerated aging.

Luckily for me, the Anxiety I’m referring to actually starts with a capital “A” and is designed to reduce rather than increase the stresses of trying to remember too many things which need to be out of my head and into a trusted system - so long as you use a Mac.  Sadly, only Mac users can get this particular form of Anxiety.  PC owners will have to settle for the original version.

Anxiety is a cool little application that does one thing but seems to do it very well.  It sits unobtrusively in your menu bar or your on your dock (or both), waiting patiently for you to enter something that you need to remember.

When you invoke it you are presented with an interface that is so simple that I don’t think it could be any simpler and still be functional.  It lets you select the calendar where you want to save the task, provides room to enter the task and shows you how many tasks are open in that particular calendar.

The only other things that you can click from the interface is an icon that opens the preferences interface and a corner that allows you to horizontally resize the GUI. That’s it.

Entering a task is fast and simple and for basic “get it out of your head and somewhere fast” sort of work this is ideal.  Invoking it using ActiveWords or Quicksilver would be even slicker.

My only complaint is that in order to provide further detail about something you’ve entered into Anxiety you have to open the item in iCal which adds an extra step and a second application to the chore of entering certain tasks.

The good news is that Anxiety is donationware so you can try it and use the full featured version absolutely free for as long as you like to figure out if it’s an application that wll work for you.  With zero risk it’s probably worth a few minutes to see if adding a little Anxiety to your work day might be just what the doctor ordered after all…

Tags: Getting Things Done, Oliver Starr, Software //