I will readily credit OmniFocus for keeping me from forgetting things that I need to do, and for being able to sleep at night because I’m not worried about what I might have forgotten.
(How to do things, stop procrastinating, and make good choices, not so much.)
OmniFocus makes capture almost effortless. I can send (or forward) an email to a custom email address, trigger an action in MailMate, Force-touch the icon on my phone to reveal a “New Inbox Item” link, or send a string out of Drafts. With Siri Shortcuts, you can skip the typing altogether.
Upon a weekly review, I’m usually relieved to see that I have a pretty good awareness of what I should be focused on, and occasionally jolted by something I would have otherwise forgot. But that’s what the system is there for: to hold ideas.
Two aspects of GTD at the ground level have always tripped me up: the review, and getting down to work.
Review
The review is a matter of time and discipline; you have to decide that at some time during each week, you’re going to look at OmniFocus. You’re going to use the Review feature and go project by project, task by task, and check off things you have done, delete things that you don’t have to do anymore, change project statuses to complete, on hold, or dropped, and move things from your inbox to a project list. For a lot of your tasks and projects, you’re just reviewing them to remind yourself that you still have a commitment to those tasks and to the larger outcome. You review your open loops.
Actually doing work
David Allen’s Getting Things Done recommends working off of your context lists. You have to consider your context: Where are you? Is this a good time to use the phone? You might, then, work off of your phone context list. Are you in a noisy cafe? Maybe you want to process email. In that case, you might work off of your @email context list. Are you out and about? Consult your @errands list.
This approach can certainly work, but anyone who works in an office can very likely make phone calls, process email, and complete writing or brainstorming tasks. Other elements are more instructive regarding what you should work on. Priority, due date, and your energy level are more likely to be your motivating factors when context is less salient.
Of course, GTD frowns on priority–for example, tasks are high, medium, or low priority–as a matter of categorization. And I get it: ever get emails from someone who rates every message (!!!)? You can waste a lot of time deterring what is a !, what is a !!, and what makes a task rise to the !!! level.
OmniFocus now supports multiple tags in instead of single contexts, so you are free to tag phone calls as !, !!, or !!!, as you like. But that’s a GTD no-no.
Flag, Man
The review serves to remind you, in part, about where you need to focus your energies. It reminds you of what is coming at you: due dates, events on your hard landscape, and emergent commitments. It also reminds you of projects on hold, things neglected, and even commitments you need to renegotiate.
So here’s what I do: upon review, if an item has a hard due date, and I didn’t date it thus, I assign a due date. If it’s not something with a hard due date, but I want to work on it between the current review and the next review, I flag it.
It may still be important to winnow down that list into more manageable lists, so I create three custom perspectives in OmniFocus:
- Today: all action items that are either due or flagged (or both)
- Due/Flagged (Work): all action items that are either due or flagged (or both) for work commitments only
- Due/Flagged (Home): all action items that are either due or flagged (or both) for home commitments only
The Today Perspective
Numbers 2 and 3 are essentially the same as Today, but separating work and home-related tasks. (I keep all projects related to each domain in their own folder in OmniFocus.) I toggle between all of these throughout the day, because I can sometimes run an errand during lunch, for example, or on the way home after work. Likewise, I can make a phone call while I’m out and about or during lunch.
The Home Perspective
None of this is perfect; I still forget things. But, as with my use of MailMate to process email, it does help me narrow my focus so that I can see what needs to be done in the near future, rather than looking at 100+ action items and panicking.
