Thanks to Apple adding To Do list functionality to Leopard’s Mail client, I have now achieved something I haven’t seen in years… a clean inbox! That is, my e-mail inbox is now completely empty, with no messages staring at me, waiting me to do something in response to them.

Most of my day-to-day conversations happen through e-mail and thus most of the things I need to accomplished are eventually brought up via one of those conversations. Until now, my method of organizing my tasks was to simply leave certain emails in my inbox to remind me of what I needed to do.

It got to the point where I would have so many e-mails in my inbox that nothing would ever get done. I would occasionally glance at the messages that had been sitting there for months, sometimes years, and continue to put them off in favor of responding to new emails that came in. If a new email warranted an action beyond a simple response, I’d let it sit at the bottom of the inbox with the rest.

Then the really fun thing happened: my hard drive completely died. Fortunately, my inbox is stored in an IMAP server, so I didn’t lose any of the emails waiting to be addressed. The crash forced me to buy a new hard drive and, in the process, gave me an opportunity to start clean with a new copy of Mac OS X Leopard, which I never bothered to upgrade to.

I decided to spend today sifting through the hundreds of e-mails that had piled up in my inboxes since the time my hard drive crashed on Saturday. In the process, I discovered that the new version of Mail included with Leopard has To Do lists built in.

Previously, I used the To Do list functionality on Netvibes.com, my RSS reader of choice. It’s a nice centralized place to have a To Do list, but it also means I have to actually remember to visit Netvibes on a daily basis in order to actually attempt to check off anything on the list. If I avoided Netvibes completely, it was like there was nothin to do, which is a better feeling than staring at a giant list of nagging tasks.

I can’t avoid e-mail and *always* have Mail open. So, having my To Do lists inside Mail is a great way for me to not ignore what I have to do. It’s also a great way to get those lingering emails off of the bottom of my inbox, tucked away in a “To Do” folder, and listed in the To Do section of Mail where I can sort them by priority, give them due dates, and even add iCal events associated with the To Do list, which is a program I’ve never bothered to use before. In other words, Mail is actually getting me a bit more organized.

Even better is the feature that allows me to highlight text in an email message and use that text as the basis for a new To Do item. That To Do item then automatically links to the email so, when it’s time to finally attack that task, I can click on a convenient little grey arrow next to the task to take me to the related email so I can read more about what I need to do. It’s all very easy.

So now, rather than e-mails piling up in my inbox, I store them away in a folder and will visit my To Do list every day, as it will be staring at me whenever I check my mail (which is normally hundreds of times a day).

Thanks, Apple!