I use OmniFocus every day, throughout each day.I use the Today perspective to see what calendar events and task need my attention each morning. I liberally chuck bits into my inbox for later processing. I review weekly.

But OmniOutliner is a bit different. It’s not built for near-instant input. It’s a powerful application whose features can be overlooked. In my use, it competes most directly with spreadsheet applications, but there are some valid reasons to prefer it over, say, Google Sheets. This year, I found one of my favorite use cases for OmniOutliner.

“Managing phases” is a fairly fancy description for what this OmniOutliner document accomplishes for me, but it provides an elegant solution. The specifics of its purpose is to help me track where I am in observing staff members (mostly teachers). New Jersey adopted a law requiring that school districts complete observations using specific, purpose-built tools.

What’s more, I like using OmniOutliner so much I find it a treat to update my progress.

Short or Long	Preconference	Observation	Post-Conference
Short	not required	20 minutes minimum	required
Long	required	40 minutes minimum	required

Table 1: Anatomy of an Observation

So an observation is not truly binary (done or not done), but rather moves through a series of smaller actions towards completion. For example, with a short observation, the classroom observation itself is one of three things: unscheduled, scheduled, or completed. Similarly, the post-conference–meet with the staff member–is either unscheduled, scheduled, or completed.

OmniFocus can be an effective tool for managing observations, especially because due dates and timelines are associated with some of the tasks. I found the vertically oriented nature of projects, however, not useful for seeing a larger view of where I am in the process. OmniOutliner’s filters, however, and I think a visual will help here, are the perfect tool.

In OmniOutliner, I created a document with seven (7) columns:

Done(checkbox)	Teacher Name	School	Long or Short	PreConference	Observation	Post-Conference
✓	Jane Doe	High School	Long	completed	completed	completed
	John Doe	Middle School	Long	scheduled	scheduled	unscheduled

Table 2: Observation Phases

Figure 1: All Observations

A long list of observations in varied states of completion is not terribly useful. But by harnessing the power of OmniOutliner’s filters, I am able to see precisely what I need to see to move the whole endeavor ahead, increment by increment–and no more. This is the true power of OmniOutliner in this application.

One useful filter is to show me what observations I have at each school. This cuts my view down from around 50 projects¹ to a dozen or fewer. For reasons of efficiency, I will try to plan as much as I can while I am in one building, observing teachers period by period, for example, and then likewise conducting post conferences during their preparatory (or “prep”) period.

Figure 2: Observations at VMS

Another filter will show me how many actual classroom observations I have to complete that would be considered “short,” meaning I can just show up and not necessarily stay for the full period (although often I will). These I can schedule back-to-back, or I can schedule a bunch in one day because they are shorter. Finally, because timelines are involved, I will often filter my observations by post-conferences remaining; once I’ve completed an observation, a timeline begins and I have a certain number of days to complete the follow-up meeting. Filtering by observations that have been completed–but where the post-conference has not been even scheduled–helps me focus and keep me in compliance with the timelines. There are more filters that I use regularly, but you get the idea.

Figure 3: Short Observations

Of course, obscuring observations that I’ve already completed when planning is unquestionably useful. To this end, I created one that only shows lines with an unchecked status box.

Figure 4: Observations Remaining

OmniOutliner lives on all of my devices: my Mac, which I usually keep in the office, my iPad, which is what a carry with me when I leave the office, my phone, my Mac at home… the application is everywhere I need it to be. And with Omni’s move to support iCloud in addition to OmniPresence, it’s in the file system where I want it to be.

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¹ A project in David Allen’s Getting Things Done is anything that requires more than one action to complete. A teacher observation is, by that definition, a project; to wit: schedule observation, observe teacher, schedule post-conference, complete post conference, wait for signature, email secretary re completion.

Note: I used a fake name generator for the sake of confidentiality.

What Trump did not say is the problem, argues David Frum in *The Atlantic*:

He offered no guidance or policy on how to prevent the spread of the disease inside the United States. Should your town cancel its St. Patrick’s Day parade? What about theatrical productions and sporting events? Classes at schools and colleges? Nothing.

He offered no explanation of what went wrong with the U.S. testing system, nor any assurance of when testing would become more widely available. His own previous promises of testing for anyone who needs it have been exploded as false. So what is true? Nothing.

And on the one thing he did say?

There was one something in the speech: a ban on travel from Europe, but not the United Kingdom. It’s a classic Trump formulation. It seeks to protect America by erecting a wall against the world, without thinking very hard how or whether the wall can work. The disease is already here. The numbers only look low because of our prior failure to provide adequate testing.

The Worst Outcome

Paul Krugman, writing for the NYT on a Sanders Presidency:

And if you’re worried about his economic agenda, what’s your concern, exactly? That he’ll raise taxes on the rich part way back to what they were under Dwight Eisenhower? That he’ll run budget deficits? Trump is doing that already — and the economic effects have been positive.

Bernie Sanders Isn’t the Left’s Trump

Keep It has been my digital junk drawer and reference filing system for the last six months or so. Today’s update adds the ability to add a sketch inside of an otherwise typewritten note, which is a welcome addition that brings feature parity with Apple’s own Notes app. There are other notable features, including automation enhancements.

I’ve been working on a review of the application, as it is in a class that I’ve always found useful since adopting Yojimbo many years ago. Stay tuned.

Keep It 1.8

Speaking of iPadOS, I recently read about a useful gesture that involves one of the OS’s most simple gestures: the long press. To wit, in OmniFocus, you can collapse and expand all projects in a folder:

There is a corresponding keyboard shortcut as well. Like the shift-click, command-click, option-click, and other combinations, you can in fact discover quite a bit by experimenting.

Joe Pinsker, writing for The Atlantic, on the dreaded Sunday Blues:

“This feeling, whether we call it anxiety, worry, stress, fear, whatever, it’s all really the same thing,” says Jonathan Abramowitz, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Psychologically, it’s a response to the perception of some sort of threat.” The perceived threat varies—it might be getting up early, or being busy and “on” for several days in a row—but the commonality, Abramowitz says, is that “we jump to conclusions” and “underestimate our ability to cope.” For most people, he reckons, the stress of Sunday is uncomfortable but ultimately manageable—and they end up coping just fine. (And just as with other forms of anxiety, some people don’t feel the Sunday scaries at all.)

This is a fascinating article in that it looks at something most people can identify with, but attribute to a multitude of different sources. From psychobiological to sociological, hypotheses run the conceptual gamut. I remember listening to Henry Rollins, no stranger to hard work, once blaming the feeling that set upon him on Sunday nights on “school damage.”

I was mulling it over today and concluded for myself that it’s the notion of a “weekend” at all that causes the feeling: if you’re hunting and gathering or farming or otherwise living life a little closer to the metal, you don’t think about things in terms of five-day work cycles. You do what you have to do when you have to do it. It’s an affordance of our modern era–where we work for someone else–that we standardize some amount of time off.

And as is noted in the article, a four-day work week would be very welcome indeed. Those feel positively luxurious.

Why People Get the ‘Sunday Scaries’