OmniFocus is a task management app, or, maybe more appropriately, a task doing app. Task management apps in the past seemed to be very good at gathering information, but maybe not so good at helping you to finish your work.OmniFocus excels at allowing you to set things and forget them (in a good way). Perspectives allow you to slice and dice your data so that you can see what’s relevant in front of you at the time (or in the place) so that you can take action.

What is a perspective?  The simplest way to understand a perspective is to think of it as a saved search. It allows you to focus on the tasks that you need to take care of when or where you can take care of them.  A perspective is a way of saving a set of information and presenting it in a way that you don’t have to think about that information (or other, non-relevant information) any more at that moment.

In the OmniFocus app, ⌃⌘P sends you to the perspectives pane.

The program is called OmniFOCUS because that’s what it allows you to do – to focus on what can or what needs to be done at a time or place.  Perspectives are an important way the program allows you to have this focus.

Merlin advises that you not spend too much time parsing and thinking and organizing, because that’s time that you could be using to actually do stuff.  Think of OmniFocus as a hip pocket, not an attic.

Merlin thinks of the inner sanctum of OmniFocus as a promise to himself.  Nothing goes in to projects or contexts that isn’t actually going to be done.  He also makes a point of making sure that no task requires more than 20 minutes to complete. If he thinks it will, then it becomes a project of two (or more) tasks.

Location stuff:
This is where the iPad app really shines.

Start dates are fantastic.  You can put a date on a project to start in the future and you don’t have to think about it until that time.  Very powerful.

Perspectives will sync with the iPad and iPhone apps.

Merlin makes a distinction between house and home, office and work.  He says that “your house is where you live, your home is an area of your life; your office is where you work and your work is what you do.” By making this distinction between task and context, it opens up the possibility of doing work anywhere, but only office stuff in your office. If you apply this to your organizational methodology, the power of the distinction is unlocked.

Don’t over taxonomize because at a certain point it stops being useful.

Merlin comes up with a use case:  Your client hasn’t paid yet for services rendered.  You can set OmniFocus up so that all the things you want to buy after you get his check deposited pop up. You make the “buying things” portion of your project contingent on the “deposit check from client” task. When you set it up this way, you don’t have to think about the things you need to buy until the task of deposit check from client is completed.

Another use case:  Merlin wants to get something from his mom’s house.  With a start date of “When I’m at my mom’s house,” (using location services) as soon as he shows up at his mom’s house in Florida, the task comes live and he can deal with it.

Everyone understands what their job is, but OmniFocus can help you figure out what you need to do today. Perspectives help you to focus on those tasks.

There is a balance to be found between finding a way to get stuff the way you want it to be so that you can do it versus having that kind of take over and becoming your “thing.”

Get really good at having the minimum number of contexts that you can get away with. If you’re not using a context, consider deleting it.

Remove friction, keep things lean.  One of the goals of OmniFocus is to shorten the path between cognition and completion. In order to become adept at this, use OmniFocus often (not all the time) and get comfortable with it.  Keep it lean – take stuff out twice as often as you put stuff in. The inbox is a safe place to put a lot of stuff because you haven’t made a decision about it yet.  That doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to go through and clean it out.

Question: How many perspectives do you (Merlin) use?  Short Answer:  Many, especially under errands.  Now, much reduced.

How does Merlin know when a job is complete?  He names the projects in a way that defines the outcome.  Ethan Schoonover tip – whenever you write a task, write it like you’re giving an instruction to an assistant that doesn’t really know what it is that you do.  In this way, when you come back on the task, you need no mental overhead to be spent trying to figure out what you should be doing – you can just start to do it. In other words, the time to do the thinking is often when you are inputting the data into the app.  When it’s fresh on your mind.  Try to download as much as possible from your brain at the moment of entering it into your system.  This may include making a symbolic link to a file in the project or task itself.  This makes things very convenient when it’s time to get the task done.

OmniFocus is for anyone who doesn’t want to think about their work to the exclusion of doing it. Merlin does not use the duration feature of OmniFocus.  He’s against due dates as well.  He would use duration with care.

Merlin stopped putting creative stuff in OmniFocus.  OmniFocus allows him to get stuff off of his desk so that he can devote the time to doing the creative stuff that he wants to do.

The whole point of OmniFocus is that it works for you – but make sure that it actually works for you, not that you become a slave to the system.

Hopefully this has been a useful (and time saving) summary of Merlin’s presentation.  If you haven’t seen them yet, click below on the links for the other two parts of this series.

Click here for part 1 of 3: OmniFocus Ninja Tricks Video Summary
Click here for part 2 of 3: Working the the OmniFocus Bookmarklet in iOS Video Summary