This is part 2 of a 3 part series- “Working the the OmniFocus Bookmarklet in iOS Video Summary”.
I had links to a few videos saved in Instapaper for a very long time because I didn’t make the time to sit down and watch the full two and a half hours of video. Once I took the time, however, I found it useful and so have decided to provide this distillation of information that I took from them in order to (hopefully) save you some time.
If you happen to have too much time on your hands and want to watch the original video from OmniFocus yourself, it can be found here.
The other two parts of my series are:
Part 1 of 3: OmniFocus Ninja Tricks Video Summary
Part 3 of 3: Tricking-out Your OmniFocus Perspectives Video Summary
The video (56 minutes) is by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders and Inbox Zero fame (among other accomplishments). It’s a pretty scattershot performance by Merlin and you can see the enthusiasm for the subject matter come through, but I’ve tried to condense his ideas here, rather than just provide a transcript.
What is a bookmarklet? A bookmarklet allows you to run javascript through a bookmark. This opens up the opportunity for your computer to do new things that were never before possible with a single click. This is powerful on a Mac, but the real power of bookmarklets are on mobile devices (despite the fact that bookmarklets tend to be difficult to set up on mobile devices).
Many people don’t realize it, but the bookmarks on the Safari toolbar can be invoked with the key combinations ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3 etc. in order to open the relevant bookmark. This is incredibly convenient when combined with the power of bookmarklets.
Merlin says that one of the goals that Ethan Schoonover and he had when turning Ethan’s Kinkless GTD system into what turned into OmniFocus was to reduce the length of the path between cognition and completion. In other words, to reduce to the extent possible the amount of friction between “Hey, this is something I might want to do.” and “Now this is on my list.”
Everyone needs his own system for how to apply a GTD or other methodology. Merlin doesn’t put everything into OmniFocus. He only puts in stuff that he will definitely do, or stuff that he is probably going to do.
He is a big fan of the OmniFocus inbox. Get everything in there and then prune things later. Just because its in the inbox doesn’t mean that you’re making a commitment to it. For Merlin, every thing that ends up within OmniFocus (i.e., in OmniFocus, but out of the inbox) is a little promise to himself. If it is going into the “sacred area” where you have projects, make sure that the task is phrased in a way that it can be completed.
Referring again to Ethan Schoonover, when you input a task into your system, word it like you are giving the task to your assistant that doesn’t quite know what you do. In this way, you’ll never come back on something and wonder what you were supposed to do with it, or what exactly you had in mind when you did your brain dump.
Merlin goes on to talk about some of the ways you can get things into OmniFocus:
Send to OmniFocus – Many apps support sending information to OmniFocus from directly within the app.
Send to OmniFocus via email– you send a file to send to omnifocus and it emails you back a link that you can click and send the information directly to OmniFocus (again, creating a new task).
Use mail rules – You can set up mail.app to automatically forward messages to OmniFocus and make a new task. OmniFocus lets you send yourself e-mails that will be processed directly into your inbox. To set it up, open OmniFocus preferences and click on “Mail.” Then select the “Add Mail Rule to create OmniFocus actions” checkbox.
Merlin goes on to talk about how he doesn’t want to have to do stuff twice. He asks if you have ever read an email on your iPhone, then mark it as unread because you’re not ready to do something about it right now. Then you have to go back to your desktop and read it again. This is where OmniFocus bookmarklets can come in handy.
Merlin talks about the bookmarklets he has in his menu bar:
1) Quix (metabookmarklet)
2) Instapaper (He also says that if you do not use Instapaper today you are high – go buy it now.)
3) Send to Tumblr
4) Make a bit.ly link
5) Send to OmniFocus
6) Readability
Note: Here is a link to the OmniFocus bookmarklet for the desktop. Simply drag the tab which that page loads in up to the bookmarks bar in your browser and it should work automatically. With this installed, you can add content from any browser window to OmniFocus quickly and easily.
Hot tip: you can select part of an email message and then click “Reply” and it will only quote that part of the message in the new message that you’ve just created. Likewise, you can select the relevant text of an incoming message (such as the task or request that you need to take action on) and click “forward” to only send that part of the message to your own OmniFocus inbox.
Alternatively, if you use Gmail, you can use the format YourUsername+OF@gmail.com in order to have OmniFocus pick up that message and add the task to your inbox.
Quick Entry – use the keyboard shortcut (you have to set up the shortcut yourself in the OmniFocus settings) to send any selected text to OmniFocus.
Merlin has an OmniFocus project called “Get Smarter” and a context called “Read.”
Merlin shows how you can use OmniFocus as a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. He does so by making the specific customer a project.
He uses MailPlane, an OSX app that allows you all the features of the Gmail web app but in a desktop form.
Merlin talks about how you can use j, k and the “[” and “]” keys in Gmail to navigate around in Gmail extra quickly – (Here is the full list of Gmail keyboard shortcuts).
Merlin says that he doesn’t keep his ideas in OmniFocus, but rather keeps them in text files for its flexibility and search-ability. Some people use OmniFocus as a bucket for ideas and that’s fine, but that’s not for everyone.
If you do use want to use OmniFocus as a bin to keep ideas in, make sure that it doesn’t get noisy and interfere with your work. As a suggestion, if you really want to do this, is to make an “ideas” project and an “ideas” context and put the project “on hold” so that it doesn’t show up regularly when you are trying to do work.
He suggests that you create repeating tasks (or projects) in OmniFocus in order to make sure that you don’t have to think about things that need to be done repeatedly such as getting a haircut (every six weeks, for example) or taking out the garbage (weekly?).
Merlin does not put creative stuff into OmniFocus. He puts other stuff into OmniFocus so that he has time to do the creative stuff.
Tip: keep the name of your contexts short and unique.
Take OmniFocus as far as you want, but not too far (Like Einstein’s quote about making things as simple as possible, but not simpler). Make OmniFocus take you far enough to take you to what you need to do, then you can walk away and do your work. Don’t let the system become the job.
Merlin shows how you can drag symbolic links into the notes area of a task. You can also drag the actual file into the notes section by ⌥ – dragging the file. You can drag address book cards into the notes section as well. So the information is contextual and it’s available when you need it.
Hopefully this provides you with the meat of Merlin’s presentation in a much quicker form than if you had watched the whole video yourself. Click below to read the other two parts from this series.
Click here for part 1 of 3: OmniFocus Ninja Tricks Video Summary
Click here for part 3 of 3: Tricking-out Your OmniFocus Perspectives Video Summary