I’m always in search of organization software that should theoretically make me more productive. QuickCal, however, is one that actually does the job rather well. Here’s the basic idea: it’s a dashboard widget for the Mac that accepts something close to natural language and automatically creates entries in iCal for you.

Here’s the scenario: you find out there’s a housing meeting tomorrow at 12:15 PM for 1 hour. You hit the dashboard shortcut on your keyboard and type in “Housing Meeting tomorrow at 12:15 for 1 hour”. As you can see from the image above, QuickCal parses this into an actual meeting, figuring out what “tomorrow” means and setting the start and end times appropriately. Better still, you can set defaults for reminders (e.g. have all events remind you 15 minutes before, or have differing rules depending on how far away the event is).

Best of all, it’s free. Check it out.