The following began as a comment to a thread over at the OmniFocus blog …
There are likely many ways of using the task management software OmniFocus, but as I’ve been using it for a while, I’ve adapted my own methods and thought it worthwhile to make mention of them. OmniFocus is an excellent program which is likely the one I use most (even including my internet browser).
For a basic guide, I refer the reader to the video at the Omnifocus page linked above. For the advanced practitioner, read on …
Have a Focus
The GTD method is excellent in that it respects the extremely valuable resource of attention. Carrying that mindset into OmniFocus can help a lot. My main focus in using OmniFocus is to get past treading water and instead into projects I need to do and, better yet, those I really enjoy.
Open Windows
For most tasks, I assign a start date to things I want to do today. Some of these are on repeat – daily, weekly or otherwise. It is a good skeleton structure around which everything can revolve. These tasks can be as simple as “check the mail” or complex like “work on billing” – broken down into individual tasks, etc …
There are usually at least 2-4 windows open :
- The main window and my center of focus: “General” aka treading-water which is basically a checklist that if I get it done, I’ll have tread water successfully (bleh).
- General Project View (just to have readily accessible)
- One flagged project I need to get done (usually work related …) (minimized)
- One flagged project I want to get done (music, video games … ) (minimized)
Flagged projects are those that I want to remain in my consciousness. I try not to have more than 5 flagged at any one time (I often break this rule, ah well).
Treading Water vs Moving Ahead
The goal for me in getting things done is in getting past treading water. The treading water window is my main window. It carries all of my repeated actions and those things that I have assigned to start today. It is a context view with the “start date” as the grouping characteristic and “available” as the grouping filter. Anything that really needs a due date gets one, but I try to stay away from that as much as possible. I think I’m allergic to the orange and red.
My goal is to get through this window so that I can do either number 3 or 4 listed above. This way, I separate those things that are treading water and those things that will move me ahead either in work or in fun.
If there are a group of tasks in a particular project I need to do in a day, I will mark one of them with the start date and then use the alt-option-r function (Show in Planning Mode) to jump to the Project and double click the Project to have it in its own window. I’ll then return to the general “Treading Water” window. This way, I have that project ready to go as its own entity and the treading water window is still available.
Whenever something I’d like to get done today comes to mind, I can get to quick entry and enter today’s date as the start date and it will show in my main context view. It will wait for me until I feel ready to go back there from my focused project.
Using Project View
A folder labeled “Routine Maintenance” rests at the top of my project list. Inside I have projects labeled “Daily”, “Weekly”, and “Monthly.” These all carry simple tasks that are set to repeat at the interval of their namesakes. Things like practice piano, clear the laptop desktop, etc…
Separately, there is also a folder at the bottom of the Projects called “Omnifocus Maintenance” with one project inside called Routine OmniFocus Organization. Inside this are the following:
- Review “Waiting for …” (repeated daily)
- Review “due” (repeated weekly)
- OmniFocus Review (repeated weekly)
- Review Projects On Hold (repeated monthly)
- Archive Completed Projects (repeated monthly)
- Flagged Projects Review (repeated daily)
All have “OmniFocus” set as their context. The reason for the placement of the “Routine Maintenance” folder at the top and the “OmniFocus Maintenance” at bottom of the Project view is in how they present in the Context view. I prefer my daily repeating tasks to show up first, my projects that require some action today to show up next, and my cleanup of the task system itself to show up at the end.
Areas of Responsibility and “Levels of Consciousness”
Areas of responsibility are folders that have folders and projects within them. These are projects that I have put tasks together and wait. There are several levels of “consciousness” that the projects here exist in. Here my psychiatrist roots show I guess.
- At the most “unconscious” are those that are completed or dropped. I rarely review these if ever.
- At the next level are those On Hold. As noted above, these are reviewed monthly. When reviewed, they either remain On Hold, are Dropped, or are made Active.
- The active state is essentially a “pre-conscious” state meaning that they are ready for recall, but are not necessarily my main focus. These are reviewed weekly. They may either go On Hold, remain Active, or become Flagged.
- Flagged items are considered in my conscious focus. These are reviewed daily and what I attempt to get to at any point.
- Finally there are those that are quite rare as both flagged and repeated – An example of this would be a major exam that requires long study. This would be flagged (occupying one of the 5 flagged spots) and repeated as a daily task – showing up in my “General” treading water window.
Review considerations
When reviewing, consider reviewing both your projects and your contexts. Are there better contexts or descriptions of contexts you could be using? Sometimes I just use “online” as a context when I’d be much better off using something like specific sites such as “amazon” or “website administration.”
Overall, the only way the system works is if it works for you. This means that as you change, you’ll need to adapt the system to work well for your quirks and eccentricities. As an example, I don’t like to see “take out the garbage” until later in the day so the process went from:
- I don’t like to see that (for several weeks it stood at this step)
- Move it to 6pm (~after work) (I didn’t like this either and it stood for a while)
- Move to 8pm (after dinner, before the family goes to bed) and change to “Prepare garbage” (meaning getting it ready to take out on the way to work the next morning) and “take out garbage” as repeating at 7am – (which didn’t look so icky anymore as it was now prepared and I’ve saved a trip downstairs).
Using Perspectives
As I have several places I tend to be – home and 2 offices each with their own characteristics – using perspectives can be helpful. One office does not have ready online access so it is un-highlighted from the rest as well as the home computer, etc. It is saved as a perspective. This perspective now becomes my main treading water window until I return home when I can select that perspective.
I think it’s clear that I enjoy task management, and I hope this helps any of you using OmniFocus. 🙂
See also:
- Part II: How to Use OmniFocus – Integrating Email
- Part III: How to Use OmniFocus – Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground
- Part IV: Using OmniFocus – Unlocking Future Projects
- Part V: Using OmniFocus – Projects, Attention, and Conditions Continued
This post is now transferred to UsingOmniFocus.com. Further commentary may be made at that site.
Very interesting, thanks. I was googling around looking for some thoughts on using start dates, as well as just generally recalibrating my methods.
A nice article on how you use OmniFocus, I’m always interested in seeing how people use it as there’s always something new to learn. A question: in the Treading Water vs Moving Ahead section, you mention double-clicking a project to open it in its own window when you’re in planning mode. How are you making this work, from a preference setting or menu option?
When I double-click a project in the main window, that project becomes focused rather than opened in a new window. I’ve checked the Preferences and can’t find anything to change the behaviour of double-clicking.
Hi Damon and Robert,
Glad you like the article. Damon, that seems odd. I just tested it myself, and I get a new window with the project focused. Looking through the preferences, I, too, couldn’t find a toggle for this.
If I do ctrl-cmd-f I get the behavior you describe, i.e. the same window with a focus on the selected task. If I double click – either in project or context modes – I get a new window with the project of the highlighted task in focus.
One thing you could do is to take an extra step and press cmd-n to open a new window and then ctrl-cmd-f to focus from there?
Thanks for this writeup. I’ve been using Omnifocus for at least a year now, and am only learning how to take advantage of the implicit secondary sorting of actions — especially through uses described like you have.
By secondary sorting I mean the manual sorting of folders reflected in the sorting of actions when grouped by something other than folders.
Thanks for the tip Kourosh. I was wrong about double-clicking a project in planning view only focusing on that project in the main window. My main OmniFocus window is maximised across the entire screen and I expected a new window would be smaller when displaying the project. It was only when I went to the Window menu and noticed there were multiple windows open that it behaves as you explained.
I’m thinking of following up this post with more on OmniFocus’ use. I have some ideas, but are there any particular points anyone would want me to address?
I’m interested in how people are doing their reviews (daily, weekly, someday etc.), how they make use of multiple windows in the reviews and so on. Also how perspectives are used for reviews but also for other uses too. Does that help?
That definitely helps, Damon. I’ll see what I can come up with over the next few days or so.
Interesting article, thanks!
But how do I show all done tasks of today?
It’s frustrating, if they’ll disappear and I can’t see,
what I’ve achieved in one day.
Regards!
Hi Sibo,
You have a couple of options available to you. If you want your completed posts to stick around all day, go to the action filter (Shift-Cmd-v or press the sunglasses on the tool bar if visible). From there, select “All” and you will see items whether they are completed or not.
If you only want to see the completed tasks until clean up, then go to preferences (Cmd-,), go to the Data Tab (second tab) and uncheck “Immediately hid completed items”.
Hope this helps!
Hi Kourosh I don’t like the orange and red and I knew right away that I had to change it to something else. I like the purple colour best so I changed next actions to blue, due soon to purple and overdue to black with a purple background.
I’m really enjoying this series. I’ve been using OmniFocus since it’s beta release, but have only skimmed the surface of possibilities.
Some screenshots of your various windows/perspectives would greatly help grasp some of your setup.
Thanks for these.
Hi Sharon,
More than the colors themselves, I prefer to avoid having due dates – though, of course, they’re unavoidable at times. If the first time I run into a task is when it shows up as a number in the sidebar, then I think something is off. I’d rather deal with tasks in advance if possible.
Robert,
Good idea – I just set up a few more screenshots throughout the posts. Hope they help.
Cheers 🙂
Again, great write up. I also tend to avoid due dates as it seems rather un-GTD-like unless things actually have a true “hard landscape.” If I’m completing my reviews properly, I find that things will get done when they’re supposed to, and due dates are only necessary when there is some external critical factor affecting when a task needs to be done (ie, an actual deadline or some other crucial thing that will be missed if the task isn’t done by a certain time or date).
Your use of start dates to build a “today” list is interesting as well. I also use start dates extensively, but I’ve moved into the habit of using flags to highlight those sorts of things that need to be in my consciousness (in a similar manner to what you do with projects). The distinction for me again comes to the iPhone client: It has a built-in Flagged perspective that allows me to see my “hot list” for actions that I need to be working on. What I like about this compared to other task management apps is that there’s no artificial “Today” constraint on this list. I don’t need to “postpone” or “re-schedule” tasks that don’t get done today — they can remain flagged and the resulting list simply becomes more of a list of things I need/want to get done “over the next couple of days.”
I basically boil my list down to several perspectives to assist in my review process:
Review: Show me everything in project view except for completed tasks, grouped by last reviewed, suitable for my weekly/monthly reviews.
Strategic: Show me all available projects/tasks in Project view, grouped by project.
Tactical: Show me all available tasks in Context view, grouped by context.
Today: Show me available flagged and due items in Context view, ungrouped. I get a flat list to action, but can still filter by context from the left-hand context list.
Hotlist: Same as Today, but opens in a separate basic window with no headers or sidebar. Just a simple flat list of my immediate action items that I can tuck into a corner somewhere while going through them.
I also frequently flag my repeating routine items to keep them on the Today/Hotlist when they come up, since I put so much extra weight on the flagged status. The Tactical, Today and Hotlist views won’t show them as they have future start dates, but when they do come up, they’re immediately dropped into the list for action.
Kourosh, Thanks for sharing your approach to GTD and OF, my journey along the same path is sure being made easier by your generosity. I love the idea of using a start date (rather than a due date) to indicate an action that I’m keen to get done today, but I’m having a problem with the (treading water) perspective you’ve shared above. The great majority of my actions don’t have a start date attributed to them, yet the first group of tasks I see when using this perspective is “Start any time” – it includes all of the “unallocated” tasks. I can click on the triangle to the left of the group title to hide them, and the items then marked as “Start today” etc are then visible. Is this the intended way of using this perspective, or have I missed something?
Hi Andrew, I’m glad that this has been helpful. I believe that you indeed have the method I suggest correctly done. There are a significant number of tasks that are hidden by the Start Any Time triangle. The Start Today is your Treading Water or Routine Maintenance list.
The method you see here has the disadvantage of no context groupings, at least until OmniFocus has a view that only shows items with a start date assigned.
There is another method that I have been toying with towards keeping a treading water list. If you keep a folder specific to routine maintenance tasks, or have projects with only these sorts of repeating tasks, you can select them, focus on them, and then go to context view. This will effectively hide all of the tasks that are not relevant to the routine tasks, and allows you to group by contexts again.
The disadvantage of this latter route, is that you no longer have the “tickler file” capacity of the route mentioned above. In other words, if I were to have a non-routine task that I wanted to look at, say a week from now, it would show up in the Treading Water view mentioned in the post, but not in the view that I describe in the paragraph above.
This idea may warrant a post of its own, but hopefully, I’ve described it well.
I use a similar process to Jesse and would be interested to know why you’ve adopted the Start Date to create a ‘Treading Water’ view rather than the Flag option?
Is this so that you can use the flag for projects? I notice that if you flag a project then all tasks within that project become flagged. In my case this would fill my flagged view with tasks I do not want to see there.
Great series by the way, thanks for taking the time and effort to write it up. Like others I’ve found it very helpful and have picked up a few tricks I hadn’t found.
I think the issue with the flag is that it can be used for many different things. I saw a user in the OF forums comment the other day that they actually use the flag for *lower*-priority items (ie, to put items on hold).
In my case, I also frequently flag projects and action groups, which does result in filling up the default flagged view. However, I don’t use that view. Instead I use a custom perspective which is actually “available and flagged” (and in OF 1.8 sneakypeek “available and (flagged or due)” ). This keeps any blocked flagged actions off my list, since they’re not yet available, but as they become available then they pop up next in the flagged list. Until recently this was a bit more of a problem in the iPhone version, as the static flagged view showed all remaining actions whether you liked it or not. Now that perspectives are available on the iPhone, however, I can use the same “Today” perspective that I use on the desktop, and it works great in that respect.
I can’t speak for the author, but the impression I get is that he’s using start dates as his first layer of daily triage and then flags for his second-level triage so that the daily routine stuff can be separated from the project-related stuff. I do something similar, except that I’ve simply got a context that says “Daily Routine” which captures all of those items that I have to get through when I first sit down at my desk. In the sense that I’m in my “routine” mode at that point I feel it’s appropriate to use a separate context for that. I consider contexts as much about a frame of mind as a particular physical location — an especially important approach for me since I work from home, so almost everything I do is in the same physical location, albeit perhaps in different rooms in the house 🙂
My morning OF routine essentially goes as follows:
– Open my “Tactical” perspective (context view, all available actions, grouped by context)
– Select my Daily Routine context (which is at the top)
– Go through my Daily Routine.
– Go through any other contexts that I think I will be “in” that day to review the lists and flag items that I want to accomplish that day.
– Open my “Today” perspective (context view, all available actions that are flagged OR due, ungrouped), which I then basically work out of for the rest of the day.
– On the rare occasions I empty my Today list, or I find myself “stuck” in a context with nothing else on the Today list, I switch back to Tactical view and look at that context for anything else that needs to be done.
This may not be “pure” GTD in the sense that I’m pulling actions from multiple contexts, but most of my contexts are normally accessible to me and I often have tasks that force me to switch context rather than waiting until the next time I’m in that context. For example, if I”m out of milk, then “Buy Milk” goes on my today list which means I actually have to get up and GO to the “Grocery Store” context rather than simply waiting until the next time I happen to be near the grocery store.
As an aside, I’ve also built some perspectives based on saved foci. The two big ones there are “Home” and “Work” which focus on the appropriate folders (I’ve grouped my projects into areas of responsibility like Business, Personal and Household). That way, when I’m working in context view on a weekend I don’t need to see all of the work-related stuff that I can’t (or don’t want to) deal with until Monday, but I still see personal stuff that needs to be done in the office like sending out e-mails to friends or paying bills online.
Anyway, just some additional food for thought…
Great comments Jesse – thank you for posting them.
The main issue, as Jesse points out, is that flags have no inherent meaning. They are what you make of them.
The same goes for contexts. While Jesse has a system worked out where contexts are about a frame of mind (which may be a better system, in fact), I tend to use them as the tool, place or person that is needed for the task. My own maintenance tasks have migrated since this post to be in a single folder dedicated to maintenance. This way, I have all the maintenance tasks separate from the other projects, but I can still use their contexts as I would for any other.
Much of OmniFocus is about adapting it to your personal method of working. As long as you can set tasks to appear when you want them to and not when you don’t, you are doing fine.
Thanks for the extra comments guys. It sounds like our setups are very similar Jesse. I use flags much like you do and very much appreciate the way they can be hidden by filtering by available tasks but appear and be included in my today view when the time is right. And I hear what you are both saying about customising based on needs, very wise.
Up until recently I haven’t had a daily review, only a weekly one, and so I used the Flag to mark all items I wanted to get done in the week ahead. This meant that I almost never reached the end of the list. This series of posts has inspired me to get serious about daily reviews and set myself some more achievable goals for each day. However now I am finding that in my daily review I need to look through too much of OmniFocus to decide what I’d like to achieve for the day. Does that make sense? Any suggestions? If there was a second flagging type option that I could use in a weekly review to plan for the week ahead that would seem ideal.
Thanks
.-= Tim Jeffries´s last blog ..Is Vitamin Water Really Good For You? =-.
One thought might be to adjust the review frequency for individual projects. You could decrease some that don’t need frequent reviews and therefore not deal with them for a longer time.
Reviews can be done daily if you wanted, but unless you’re vigilant about keeping a low number of high frequency reviews, it may quickly become overwhelming.
Yes, good point thanks, it’s probably time I went back through my projects and set the review period for each.
I’m not doing a full review each day, I’m just looking over my projects trying to work out which tasks I’d like to get done today.
I guess I could probably create a perspective where I just look at the next actions for my projects and select from that list. Although I find that many of my actions are in single action lists as they don’t relate directly to any larger project and in that case the Next Action list isn’t very helpful.
.-= Tim Jeffries´s last blog ..Is Vitamin Water Really Good For You? =-.
Well, in my case I do my daily reviews strictly in context view. I only visit planning view during my weekly reviews or when I need to specifically plan or layout a new project or expand upon an existing one on the fly.
My weekly review sets up my actions and their contexts for the week, and then I do my daily reviews simply by looking at which contexts I have any chance of “visiting” that day — much easier during a daily review as I usually have a good idea of where I’m able to be that day, both mentally and physically. I skip over contexts that are not expected to be available to me and contexts that I use strictly for “only-when-I’m-there” types of tasks.
Another trick I use during my weekly and monthly reviews is to prioritize my projects and single actions in my buckets simply by dragging them up or down in the planning view. All other things being equal, items in each context are sorted based on their relative positions from the planning view. My “Tactical” context view is sorted by due date within each context, so the really urgent things come up near the top, and then everything else is ordered according to its place within the planning view. I should note that I rarely have available tasks with due dates that are far into the future — those tasks are either blocked by a higher-priority action in their project, or their blocked by a start date (if it’s not due for another couple of months, chances are I don’t have to think about it until closer to that date). Ergo, my “due” sorting in context view only shows near-term tasks with due dates (usually due within a week).
Note that I *do* flag items during my weekly review, but in those cases I also attach start dates to them so that they don’t show up until the date that I expect to do them. For example, if I know that I’m going to need to do something on Wednesday, I’ll flag it and then put a start date of Wednesday on it during my weekly review. That way it stays hidden until I’m ready to deal with it. Once upon a time I used this in place of daily reviews, but that degree of forecasting quickly became unwieldy and impractical.
My daily reviews done in context mode usually don’t take me more than 5-10 minutes even on a day where I have to look at a lot of contexts. Most days it’s even faster since I know I’ll only be able to “visit” specific contexts on any given day.
So Jesse can I ask, in your weekly review how do you stop tasks appearing in the context view that you don’t think you’ll be able to do in the coming week? Do you mark tasks that you don’t expect to get to in the coming week with a start date in the future or something? At the moment if I look by available tasks in context view I can be overwhelmed by options of possible things to do, nothing urgent just possible options.
Thanks again, this is very helpful.
.-= Tim Jeffries´s last blog ..Is Vitamin Water Really Good For You? =-.
I’m actually a huge fan of start dates in general, and I do a lot of very long-term planning — my OF has several annually recurring projects, and I’ll commonly enter single actions with start dates several months or more into the future. So, along the same token, if I have tasks that I know are a week or more out, I put future start dates on those pretty much as soon as I create them, and a big part of my weekly review is adjusting start dates as appropriate.
However, I tend to confine setting future start dates to those actions that either can’t be done at all until a future date, or those I’ve consciously put off until later (low priority things that I don’t want to think about). I’m fairly selective about what I apply start dates to: I have to be sure I don’t want that item on my radar before the start date or at least my next weekly review.
I most commonly use start dates for single actions, which I have a lot of, since I use Omnifocus for managing everything from writing a book to taking out the garbage. Actual projects are more likely to just get put on hold and then picked up during my next weekly review unless they actually do have a concrete start date.
However, I’ve also made much more judicious use of contexts in order to keep the lists smaller during my daily “tactical” review and allow me to keep a better focus on what’s important. For example, my “Office” context used to get massive, since I threw in everything I could logically do while sitting at my desk. I’ve since refined that into “frame-of-mind” areas, which are particularly useful for lower-priority actions that I’m only going to do when I’m in those modes. For instance, I have contexts such as “Leisure” for things like books I want to read, movies I want to see, etc, and “Research” for things I want to read up on, new software I want to check out, etc. These don’t get checked at all during my daily review, since I’m not going to find any items in there that would be important enough to “force” me into those contexts — they’re contexts I’m going to specifically visit only when I’m in the appropriate “mode.”
The final key here is the sorting and reorganization that I do in planning mode during my weekly review. Reorganizing the items in my single-action buckets and reorganizing my projects sets the order in which the items appear in my actual contexts. Since each context is in descending order by priority and I can only do so much in a day, I simply work through each context until I’ve flagged a realistic number of items and then ignore the rest.
Jesse,
I’m finally able to give a run to your idea of flags on maintenance tasks alongside the Flagged or Due context view. It seems like a very neat way of combining the views. I’ll give it a week or so to see how it runs …
– Kourosh
That’s all been very helpful. Thank you again for responding to my questions.
I guess I should go and actually do something now that I’ve spent a fair chunk of my day organising myself. 😉
Hello,
I have a question about this:
“All have “OmniFocus” set as their context. The reason for the placement of the “Routine Maintenance” folder at the top and the “OmniFocus Maintenance” at bottom of the Project view is in how they present in the Context view. I prefer my daily repeating tasks to show up first, my projects that require some action today to show up next, and my cleanup of the task system itself to show up at the end.”
I set my maintenance folders up the same way, but I don’t see the OmniFocus context because it’s at the bottom of ALL actions in Context view. In the quote above you say, “my projects that require some action today to show up next”…
What am I missing to make projects requiring action today to show and not all actions?
Thanks.
.-= Darla´s last blog ..Max Strom’s First Book: A Life Worth Breathing: A Yoga Master’s Handbook of Strength, Grace, and Healing =-.
Hi Darla,
Hmm, I’m not sure I know what you are seeing. With the configuration above, do you have two major tiers of dates – “Start any time” and “Start today”? If so, then the first would be hoisted, so that only the “Start today” tasks would appear.
I mention this because you note that All of your actions are appearing in context view.
Does this help?
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