Over the past couple of days I’ve been spending a few moments playing with Automator and Spotlight to see how feasible it is to employ these as a way of managing my work in a Getting Things Done kind of way.

I’ve already started using Spotlight to open Applications and Documents rather than using Finder – something I didn’t reckon I would do. (Funny, since I wrote that it would change the way I work, and doh, then it does!)

So for GTD, I’ve created Automator actions to colour Finder files via Finder plugins. Why not just use the contextual label colouring? Well, Spotlight only has ‘AND’ operations and there’s no way of searching for labels that have ANY colour. This means that I have to annotate the files with an indication that they have been coloured via the plugin. It would be great to add arbitrary keywords (or metadata) to files via the Finder (and thus via Automator), but unfortunately such things aren’t yet supported. Instead I have had to use the Spotlight Comment field. Which means I can’t use it for anything else.

Still, it works and I have my Smart Folders for GTD in my dock. One click and ‘boom’ they’re there.

37signals recently launched their new web service Backpack, which is a Wiki-like organisational tool. They also just added tags, which allows you to specify any number of words (or phrases). Backpack is something I’d like to think would be useful, but it’s not yet mature enough to use for anything I feel it could be used for, like GTD for example. I could use tags, but there’s no way for searching for pages that meet criteria – indeed there’s no search capability at all at present.

And that’s my problem. Spotlight has changed the way I perceive applications and web services. It’s not now just good enough to be able to store and manipulate information in a nice way. It also needs to be easily retrievable according to the criteria I want to specify, not just what the creators expected or anticipated.