1. Playlist .. is … “Metal” (for example), and
2. Last Played … is not in the last … “1″ … weeks

(Click on the above image to see a fullscreen view of my setup)

So when I click on a playlist (named after the genre it represents) in the “Shufflers” folder, and hit enter (or the “Play” button on my Mac keyboard), it begins playing all songs by the genres specified in the “Rules” playlist that haven’t been played in the last week… one at a time, of course. For especially long lists (like Metal, for example…I like my metal), the number of weeks can be increased, so I can listen to my entire library or metal before repeating any songs over again (mine’s huge). Each playlist is set to shuffle, so I don’t hear the same artist back to back (extremely rare, iTunes is very good at shuffling). And finally, I use this plugin, called DeskTunes, for Quicksilver that puts a little bit of imagery on my desktop (usually just the album art, song and artist name and a rating grid for rating each song as it plays) that I can conveniently see just below the edge of any program window I have open (designer’s genius? I wonder…), and I can take a brief second to rate the song currently playing as I’m listening to it and going about my business on the computer. It’s actually quite a nice setup… heh, and I’m enjoying it pretty well. I’ve been thinking about adding new genre playlists recently, but I suppose I’ll try to listen to everything, then see what hasn’t been played fully yet, and then make a playlist for those songs and see how that one goes. My thought it it’ll be just fine :).

Hope this is helpful and even fun for some of you out there, I know I enjoyed discovering that I didn’t have to listen to straight artists and be disappointed when their music ended and I only had a little of it and then something completely different began… that was a weird feeling to go from As Tall As Lions Amon Amarth sometimes. It’s cool to learn you can shuffle a lot of artists and still enjoy the music listening experience. In a way I almost enjoy it more. I get to discover all this new music I knew I had but had never listened to before… it’s a fun thing to do. So for all you music and iTunes junkies out there, enjoy the trick, and let me know how your setup goes in the comments below!

Tick
Tick is a project-management webapp that basically allows you to list your projects, keep track of individual tasks on each of them and define how many hours each should take, essentially all in an effort to get you to meet your “time budget.”  Tick is unfortunately a trial and only allows you to have one project listed and open (currently being worked on) at a time, with the paid upgrade of somewhere around what I believe was $10.  I currently use Anxiety, though, so I’m probably going to cancel my membership with Tick.

Anxiety
Anxiety is a lightweight, free task management app that is… well… a task manager that integrates beautifully with Apple’s Mail and iCal, giving yo all the benefits of different calendars and events within those calendars, separating your work, personal, bigger ideas.  It hovers over all applications with the option to hide it and each tasks even have handy little check boxes on the side so that once you’re done, you just check it off, and it’s immediately updated as one less to-do in Mail and iCal.  It’s a very useful tool, and its constant visual presence on the screen I find is a reminder of the things I should be doing when I’m doing things like aimless internet surfing or on a YouTube binge.

RescueTime
I really just wanted to post on the blog because of the email verification I got from downloading this app.  There’s a required registration for it, but the email was nice enough of a surprise and the app sounds like it’s going to do a great job, so I’m aiming to keep it.  From the little I found out about it, it tracks what you do while on the computer and send you a weekly report of how you spent your time, as well as offering a range of full-featured graphs and tools to see how distracted you were when you should have been working.  Yup, something I can definitely make use of ;).  Here’s a screenshot of part of the confirmation email:

I thought that was a great change of pace from the typical “Hello, thank you, go to our site, goodbye” messages.  I was glad to receive something like that from what it essentially makes out to be three guys goofing around with their program for the good of others.

So, three programs that can help you (and me) get things done.  The two I use so far work great, though I’ve only had about an hour’s worth of experience with RescueTime running in the background, so really it’s that I love Anxiety.  That mixed with Quicksilver and the built-in Mail and iCal on Mac are a wonderful workflow.  How do you manage your time and your projects?  Let me know!