Beginner's OmniFocus Series: (#4) Gaining Some Perspectives

This beginner’s series will go through the steps (to my best recollection) that I took to arrive at a workable set of tactics for managing my GTD setup in OmniFocus.

There are many guides out there but they tend to either stay at 50,000 feet and gloss over some of the hard decisions or the go very deep and can sometimes be overwhelming for the new OmniFocus user. I don’t intend this to be a user manual. As such, I won’t go through what buttons to push and which menu items to click. I want to focus on the desire to get your life organized using OmniFocus and how to get there with as few false starts as possible. I had many and I’m hoping this post helps you avoid a few.

What I hope to do is be as thorough as possible in describing my thinking with each step in the process of my OmniFocus setup and hope that it speaks with enough universality that it will help others during that critical stage of setup.

Part One of this series, about setting up Projects and Single-Action lists, is located here. Part Two, focusing on Contexts, can be found here. Part Three, with a concentration on the Review process can be found here.

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And so we arrive at a feature that not all users will necessarily be able to take advantage of in OmniFocus, Perspectives. In order to be able to use Perspectives, you will need OmniFocus for Mac but once they are built, you will be able to use them on all of your devices (with a few notable caveats which I will explain).

What Are Perspectives?

The term Perspective in OmniFocus describes a custom view of your data. This custom view is then propagated to all of your devices and gives you a unified way to see all tasks that are visible within a given Perspective. Keep in mind, OmniFocus is basically a database of your tasks. With Perspectives, you are given tools within the application to view that database in different ways, based on your needs at the time.

Rather than dive into the minutiae of creating a Perspective, let me describe some examples to give you an idea of their power and usefulness.

As I described in my Contexts post, ordering and displaying your tasks based on where you are at the time is one of the key features of the GTD methodology. Of course different Contexts comprise a wide variety of environments and places. When I’m at home, I don’t want to be bothered with tasks than can only be accomplished in the work context and vice versa. To create a trimmed down view of things that need to be done, targeted for when I’m at home, I created a “Home” perspective.

When I select this perspective, I only see tasks relevant to my home locations and tools — my phone, my macbook air, errands, chores, family, etc. (these are contexts, by the way). I further restrict the tasks to remaining and available tasks to make sure I only see the things I care about when I’m getting things done at home.

I have a similar perspective for work, one specifically to see “Stalled Projects”, and a key one called “High Priority” which I use everyday to make sure I don’t miss anything critical.

While you can create a perspective based on Projects or Contexts, Context-based perspectives are important because they can be synced to your iPad and iPhone. While there are uses for Project-based perspectives, their inability to sync makes them less universal. My hope is that someday Omnigroup will allow for Project-based perspectives on the iPad. It is becoming more a of power-user device and a Perspective for looking at all of the tasks in a given project, filtered just the way you want, would be immensely useful.

Once the perspectives are created, assuming they are context-based, they will automatically sync over to your iPhone or iPad. One tap and you’ll have the same view you just left on your Mac, ordered just how you want and omitting anything you don’t care to see at the time.

For those of you getting a sense of how great this would be, I’ll show you how to create perspectives but, if you’re still a bit foggy on why this matters, read on and I’ll make a case for why this feature is one of the most important in OmniFocus.

How To Create Perspectives

I’m going to start by showing you how to create my most-used, most important perspective, High Priority.

The goal for High Priority is to consolidate all of the things that I can’t forget or things that are time-based in the sense that they need to be done by the end of a given day. It doesn’t necessarily matter when during the day; only that they must be done at some point.

What are the components that would be useful to such a view?

• Items that are “Remaining”
• Items that have a “Due date” of today (or before)
• Items that are “Available”
• Items that are “Flagged”

The next step is to figure out how to create a view showing these needs.

First, hit Shift-⌘-V to show the View bar and make sure all of your Contexts are visible on the left hand panel. For High Priority, I don’t want to filter the contexts by Home or Work because, for me, this type of view spans where things get done. I’ll have other perspectives to show things at that level which I’ll describe later.

Once the drop-downs in the View bar accurate describe what you want in your own High Priority view of the world, take a look at the sorting. I generally organize it by Project (even though this is a context-based view) by selecting “Project” in the Sorting drop-down. This makes it so thats that things are grouped roughly at a project level but organized into larger headings by Context.

Here are the settings for my High Priority view in the View bar.

• Context Filter - Remaining
• Grouping - Context
• Sorting - Project
• Availability Filter - Available
• Status Filter - Due or Flagged
• Estimated Time Filter - Any Duration

At this point, you’re all set to save this perspective, but wait! You need to also do any sort of visual customization since all of the window settings get saved along with your perspective. Now that we’ve set up our View bar, there’s no longer any need for it to take up space, so I toggle that off. I also re-size my left hand pane (showing Contexts) to be the width of the widest context to reduce the amount of screen estate it is taking up. Now we’re ready to save the perspective.

Choose Perspectives > Save Window As… > New Perspective. Once you do this, a settings sheet will appear detailing and recapping all of the options you’ve selected and prompting you to name your new perspective. (You can even give your perspective a customized icon, if you want)

That’s basically how it’s all done. Everything else perspective-related is just a variation of this.

How to Use Your Perspectives

Once you get a few perspectives built, you will probably start using them as your default method of interacting with OmniFocus on all of your devices. Yes, they’re that good.

What other perspectives can you think of right off the bat? Here’s a few I use but I’m sure you’ll come up with many more as you start tailoring the ideas laid out here to your needs.

• You may want to see Completed, sorted by date in order to get a sense of what your progress has been for a given week.
• Maybe you want to see tasks that only apply when you are at your home or apartment, sorted by Project so you can skim them and see if you’re missing any steps.
• You can create a perspective for a specific type of Review process that you want to do. This might include Available or Next Action items, sorted by date and grouped by Project.

I have five commonly used perspectives that handle the bulk of my OmniFocus viewing and task management. Three of them are Context-based and are on my phone and two of them are Project-based, used solely on my Macbook Air.

• High Priority - See above. My most-viewed context. When I get this down to zero items, it’s usually a pretty productive day.
• Home Contexts - Yes, that’s actually the name for it. I created this by clicking on my root folder for all Home-based contexts and creating a perspective around it.
• Work Contexts - Same deal. Clicked on the root folder for Work-based contexts and created a perspective around it. I should note that my Phone context is included in both of these since I have it with me wherever I go — Home or Work.
• Home Projects - This is a list of all Projects in my Home folder. It’s not sorted in any particular way and includes tasks in any state (except completed). This is just a quick way to skim project-based tasks and serves as basis for a rudimentary review process.
• Work Projects - Same as “Home Projects” except it is work-based tasks.

Between these five perspectives I can handle pretty much anything thrown at me (and OmniFocus). The good thing about perspectives is that they can evolve as your needs evolve. Since they are completely custom, if you decide that you want to start showing things you’ve completed in order to provide some sort of weekly retrospective, you can easily do this with just a few clicks.

As I’ve tried to demonstrate often in this series, OmniFocus is chameleon-like and robust, malleable and extensible. As far as I’m concerned, it is the embodiment of the Getting Things Done ethos. I use it every day in dozens of ways and I’m hoping that putting together this series getting you closer to realizing your investment in the programs. I’m hoping it also unlocks your potential as someone who just wants to get projects finished.

Up next, I plan on doing a Beginner’s Series entry on “OmniFocus for Software Developers”. It is going to be a comprehensive look at how I use the tool to manage technical projects (sometimes several at once). I’ll try to provide some insight as to how OmniFocus can help in these unique situations but also provide signposts for how these techniques can apply to projects of all types.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate all of the feedback. Hit me up via the Contact page, Twitter, or Google+.

Merlin Mann on the next Mac Power Users

Merlin hinted at an upcoming appearance on next week's Mac Power Users. I'm all tingly. His first two appearances on the show basically morphed my workflow into what it is today.

I can't wait for this one.

Beginner's OmniFocus Series: (#3) Reviewing the Review Process

This beginner's series will go through the steps (to my best recollection) that I took to arrive at a workable set of tactics for managing my GTD setup in OmniFocus.

There are many guides out there but they tend to either stay at 50,000 feet and gloss over some of the hard decisions or the go very deep and can sometimes be overwhelming for the new OmniFocus user. I don't intend this to be a user manual. As such, I won't go through what buttons to push and which menu items to click. I want to focus on the desire to get your life organized using OmniFocus and how to get there with as few false starts as possible. I had many and I'm hoping this post helps you avoid a few.

What I hope to do is be as thorough as possible in describing my thinking with each step in the process of my OmniFocus setup and hope that it speaks with enough universality that it will help others during that critical stage of setup.

Part One of this series, about setting up Projects and Single-Action lists, is located here. Part Two, focusing on Contexts, can be found here.

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I just finished an OmniFocus review. It was a lengthy one because things have been ultra-hectic lately. I've still been grinding through my daily reviews but they were hastily done, too quick for their own good.

The most obvious feeling after finishing one of the big ones is a huge sense of relief, purpose, and momentum. "Lightness" is a word that's often been mentioned as well.

As I described in part one of this series, your initial capture into OmniFocus is a key aspect of getting up and rolling with a sustainable system. You have to be honest with yourself and make sure you leave no stone unturned when inputting all of those things that have been weighing you down.

Once the initial capture is done, the system starts doing its thing and often you'll find that it works well for a while. Sure, you may tweak it here or there, but generally if you gave it enough thought up front, you'll be able to reap the rewards of a self-sustaining system that provides a good deal of benefit.

But often, it doesn't work out that way. We'll create new contexts, new projects and put items in OmniFocus that really shouldn't be there (like lists of random stuff*). Eventually, the source of clarity becomes as cluttered as the life we were trying to fix.

Frequent reviews are the solution to this problem.

What is a GTD Review?

A review, in GTD terms, is simply going through your projects and task lists, deleting things that no longer need to be done, marking things complete if you neglected to do so earlier, adding new projects, phases, tasks or contexts to better organize and manage your OmniFocus queue.

On the surface, it is merely cleaning up your mess, but done right, a review is a powerful tool you can use to reorient your priorities and put yourself on a better trajectory to stay on track with your of critical tasks.

When you're in the heat of the moment, often you'll enter tasks, flag them and set their due date to a time in the near future to show how important they are. In the review phase, what will often happen to you'll re-examine those priorities in the context of other projects and it will completely change how you view them. Sometimes circumstances are much more dire than you realized but, more often, you'll end up turning down the flame for those front-burner tasks.

The review is a mechanical task, to be sure, but there is a mental component to it that is hard to describe to someone who hasn't gone through one. It isn't simply that tasks are getting moved around, sorted and cleaned up. You also get a comprehensive view of the job laid out ahead of you. By "job", in this case, I'm speaking in general terms about the totality of projects and tasks you have in your short term and long term future. Heady stuff, but when you finish a big review you'll see what I mean.

How I Do OmniFocus Reviews

This all sounds pretty simple, and it really is, but we often get so caught up in our day-to-day that we forget to do it.

OmniFocus has been set up to mimic David Allen's GTD methodology. When a project is created, one of the first things you should do is go into the project properties (shift⌘-I) and set a review date.

You can also set how often you want OmniFocus to remind you to do a review of this new project as well. If it is a project that will be changing a lot, you might want to review it daily, whereas if it is a project that will have just a few tasks happening at low frequency, you could get away with a monthly review cycle. My default is "weekly", but I have some Single-Action lists that I review much more often than that; some get reviewed every morning.

I have my Review and Mark Reviewed buttons on my main toolbar in OmniFocus, not only to make them convenient to use, but also to keep reminding me to review whenever I have time.

The process of the review itself is fairly straightforward. A click of the Review button will put OmniFocus in Review mode. You'll see a list of projects, listed in chronological order by the last time they were reviewed. Go through each project and examine the tasks in each one. Take the time to clean them up, move them to a different phase of the project or a different context if circumstances have changed.

Here's a list of things I do when going through the review process.

• Fix spelling and capitalization - it sounds trivial but it helps keep things lined up. If you're one of these "clean desk/clean mind" people (like me), this is something to consider. If you're someone like Merlin Mann, maybe not so much...
• Make tasks more actionable if needed - Don't leave a task worded vaguely. For instance if you quickly entered "Goals document", go back and add something to say what you need to do with the document. "Finish goal document" or "Complete and email goal document" would be somewhat more descriptive. Now's the time to break that task into two tasks if you need help getting it done - "Complete goal document" and "Email goal document to my boss", for example.
• Move tasks to more appropriate contexts - You have "Complete goal document" in your Computer context but maybe you need to come up with some goals first so your Thinking context might make more sense.
• Put projects on hold to reduce clutter if you're making no progress on them - I've started doing this more and more. If you have no tasks that need to be done for a while, just put the project on hold, which will effectively remove it from most of your views (and if it doesn't, my next entry in the Beginner's series will tell you how with Perspectives). Since you're going to be doing regular reviews from now on (right?!), if the project heats up again, you'll see it during the review process and you can simply reactivate it. Making sure your view filters are set to "Available", rather than "Remaining", is key for uncluttering your view using this method.
• Reactivate projects that you put on hold - See above...
• Delete, delete, delete - When you find a dead task, just get rid of it. If you think you may have need of it someday, delete it. "Delete" should be your first choice when dealing with a task like this and be as ruthless as you can. If you really must save this marginally useful task, stash it away in a "Waiting" project (a permanently-on-hold project at the bottom of your project list). You'll get to visit this task every time you do a review until you finally get the courage to delete it. Or you can just delete it now. Go ahead. You know you want to.
• Add tasks - Conversely, in doing a review, you'll sometimes remember things that never made it into OmniFocus. Now's the time to add them. I'll also take a task that has been lingering and break it down into smaller tasks which have a better chance of getting acted on.

Theory / Practice

Overall, the review doesn't sound like a revolutionary idea. In fact, it probably sounds like drudgery if you haven't done one yet.

By starting with a weekly review schedule on projects, a daily review schedule on Single-Action lists and (if you're a task hoarder), a quarterly review on your "On Hold" and "Waiting" projects, you'll see how useful the process is for you and tune your review frequency to what works best.

Part 4 in the series is going to focus on OmniFocus's Perspectives feature. Tune in soon for that one because it is one of the most useful features in OmniFocus, especially if you use the iPad and iPhone versions of the app.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate all of the feedback. Continue to send it, whether using the Contact page, Twitter, or Google+.

If there are any other topics that you think would be good for a "Beginner's OmniFocus Series" post, let me know and, as always, the support is greatly appreciated.

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* Generally I move my lists of things to text files stored in Dropbox. I give them a "runx" prefix to designate them as files undergoing neverending editing and a topic. I have a lot of these files but "runx books to finish" and "runx games to finish" are a few examples. Using nvALT, I can access and search these files extremely quickly and it reduces clutter in OmniFocus.

Planning a Paperless Office (with David Sparks' Paperless)

I've thrown myself into setting up a full-on paperless office. My impetus was , of course, David Sparks' book Paperless and, to put a completely nerd-related point on it, I plan on putting together a workflow using iThoughts HD tonight.

David's book finally got me moving on this whole idea it because it provides clear examples and some good tactics for dealing with the issues that have always nagged at me:

• What is the best format to store documents for longevity's sake? Will I be able to open all of the documents I spent time scanning 10 years from now? Will I even want to bother?
• What is the best scanner? Creating a frictionless setup is key to using something long term, so getting a scanner that fulfils the requirement of "easiest device ever" is something I've done a lot of research on. Macsparky had some good ideas there.
• How should I store, process, name and backup my documents? These are very well handled in Paperless and were worth the price of the book alone.

What I've come up with will end up being an amalgam of ideas. Some of them are concepts I've been storing in OmniFocus over the last few months in a project called "Go Paperless" (which has been "on hold" since the day I created it) but many were derived or enforced by my reading of Paperless.

Some of the alternate ideas I will likely incorporate in my setup are things I'll likely describe in an upcoming post, once everything is working well. Things like using Knox from Agilebits, creating a naming taxonomy that is similar to David's but builds on many of the things I've talked about in other posts, integrating an online backup tools to augment my Time Capsule and others might provide some use for people who are still teetering on the edge of creating their own paperless solution.

Paperless was a quick read (it just took me an evening) but it had lots of well-done screencasts and lots of photography which enhances every chapter. Go check it out, reduce the amount of clutter in your life and look for a post on this site for some extensions to David's concepts and alternate solutions which may fit more into your workflow.

Lists in OmniFocus - gridwriter's approach

If you haven't caught Rob A.'s recent post about how he approaches lists in OmniFocus, you should go read it now. I may handle my lists slightly differently than Rob but they are integral to my daily workflow.

Rob has inspired me and I'll write a sibling post to his outlining how I do it but I still have a few "Beginner's Series" posts to finish. Thanks for the great article, Rob!