It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Instapaper, but sometimes it brings out the worst in me in terms of procrastination. This is ironic since the topic of this post is OmniFocus, which should, in theory, be just the tool to help me overcome this disability.
At some point, I came across (probably via the OmniGroup twitter feed) a series of videos from Omni at MacWorld (2011) with tips and tricks on how to get the most out of OmniFocus. Since I usually read my twitter feed on the go, a lot of interesting stuff ends up in Instapaper to languish until I can spend the time going through whatever it was I found interesting to begin with. That was especially the case with these three videos as between the three of them it was two and a half hours of watching to do.
Finally, I got the time yesterday to sit in front of the computer and go through them, and I’m disappointed that I waited so long to do so.
Since many of you are probably as busy or busier than I am, I am going to take a couple extra minutes hours to save you the hassle of spending the 2.5 hours of video watching, and I’ll try to distill for you the parts of the videos that I found most interesting/ useful.
This is part 1 of 3- OmniFocus Ninja Tricks Video Summary. The original video from OmniFocus is found here, if you have too much time on your hands and want to watch it for yourself. The other two parts are:
Part 2 of 3: Working with the OmniFocus Bookmarklet in iOS Video Review
Part 3 of 3: Tricking-out Your OmniFocus Perspectives Video Review
The presentation (30 minutes) is by David Sparks, trial attorney and editor of MacSparky.
David starts by saying that there are four steps to using a task management application:
-Capture (getting the information into your computer so you don’t forget about it)
-Process (what’s important and when to do it)
-Action (actually doing stuff)
-Review (allows you to see active projects and what you haven’t done your work on yet)
Capture
When explaining capture, he starts by showing clippings. Using clippings, you can use a keyboard shortcut (David uses ⌃⌥⌘ C – the three buttons beside the keyboard (Control, Option, Command) plus “c” for capture) to add data to OmniFocus from any app. To set this up, hit ⌘ + , (command + the comma – to enter the “Settings” menu) in OmniFocus, then select the Clippings Tab.
You can also use relative dates on the clipping entry in OmniFocus by typing things like “tomorrow,” “3d,” “Feb 7” or “30” in the date fields to have OmniFocus automatically input date of tomorrow, three days from now, the next February 7th or the next 30th of the month, respectively. Note that I don’t think that any of the dates fields are displayed by default in OmniFocus and you may have to right-click on the bar at the top of the screen (Name, Project, Context…) in order to select that you want date fields to be visible.
David also mentions the quick entry shortcut (the OmniFocus default is ⌃⌥ <space>) that opens the quick entry box for easy entry to the program (note that this only works while OmniFocus is open).
Process
The idea behind processing is to do it at a set time and to clear out your inbox. You should continuously capture information, but if you try to process constantly you will find yourself spending all of your time playing with the application and none of your time actually doing what needs to be done (sound familiar?). When processing, you should assign items from the inbox into projects or contexts.
Action
Once you have your data into OmniFocus and sorted into projects or contexts, then it is time to take action. You really only want to see tasks that you can or need to take action on. There’s no point in seeing every single item that is on your to-do list if you can’t or don’t need to take care of them now. You can view the tasks due by project or by using perspectives (more on that in part 3). The ⌘K keyboard shortcut cleans up your view by making any tasks that are currently inactive invisible.
David also advocates using the OmniFocus Mac application only at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. This way you leave the middle of your day for actually doing things and completing tasks. He says that he uses the OmniFocus for iPhone or iPad apps to check things off throughout the day.
Review
The idea of a review is to keep track of the projects that you have ongoing. Using OmniFocus you can do this by clicking on the “Review” tab. You can use the review timer in the inspector to establish how often you want to review a particular task. David likes to do a review early every Monday morning in order to get a view of what’s going on in advance of the week ahead. He also highly recommends using the iPad app for the review if you have it since Omni has done a great job of designing the way that it works on the iPad app.
Conclusion
David’s two main takeaways from the presentation are to make use of start dates (he says that “end dates are kryptonite” because if you let them slip you will start to ignore tasks as they pile up) and to make sure that your daily list of tasks doesn’t contain more than you actually plan on doing for the day.
Click here for Part 2 of 3: Working with the OmniFocus Bookmarklet in iOS Video Review
Click here for Part 3 of 3: Tricking-out Your OmniFocus Perspectives Video Review