If you’re only arriving here, please read How to Deal with the Coronavirus Information Overload – Part 1 of 2.  There, we considered news overload and one way to manage, at least, some of it.  Here, we look at how to set up that process in a task manager. Please note, this is an advanced case use with OmniFocus.

How to Create a Dedicated Project Using OmniFocus

Here, I present my own set up in OmniFocus. The following is my “Stay Up to Date with Coronavirus” project:

Each of these are tasks that I’d like to follow up. At a broader view, here is my daily list (called “Current”) where I link to the Coronavirus project:

Under the Hood

Each of my tasks carry a link to get me to the actual work. Expanding the note fields in the project, you can see links that connect to my reference storage and useful websites:

In the project note field, I keep a link to a DEVONthink group where I store any articles I’ve read or want to read:

which links to:

Several tasks in OmniFocus then repeat daily:

Using Jesse Hollington’s ever-useful go to link, I can quickly hotkey my way to whatever I want to read.

Adding It to the Day

From here, the project itself is linked to from my Navigation projects as part of my major routines (For a detailed look at creating a Navigation system see p712 of Creating Flow with OmniFocus):

I set the launch task to repeat daily linking it to the project:

At this point, I have a repeating task representing a single session of study for the day:

The work has a place. It doesn’t spill over and take up more or less time than I consider reasonable. I can go through the news that I care for in a targeted fashion. I can do so at the beginning, middle, or end of the day. When I’m done, I mark the task complete knowing it will appear again tomorrow. If I run into something I want to read later, I can add it to the “Stay Up to Date with CoronaVirus” project and it will wait until the next time the launch task becomes active.