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+.

Beginner's OmniFocus Series: (#2) Setting up Contexts

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

As I stated in my post "Beginner's OmniFocus", one of the most baffling things about Getting Things Done was the concept of "Contexts".

Briefly put, Contexts are where things get done. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people and that's why people have such a rough time grasping it the first time they sit in front of a newly-installed version of OmniFocus.

My initial approach to the concept, as a newcomer, was to think of this simply as "Work" and "Home". As I started examining the tasks I had put into OmniFocus during my first capture, things got a little muddy.

• What if I'm at work but need to make a phone call about a home-related project?
• Are work trips still considered a "Work" context? I'm unable to do work-related functions when I'm away, so how can that concept hold up?
• Is "Computer" a context? If so, I can use the computer at work and home and have tasks for each -- how do I deal with that?
• "Phone" is where phone calls get done -- does it matter if they are work or home phone calls?

The questions got more confusing and I found myself cutting my idea of specific contexts finer and finer until they no longer held any meaning for me. I needed a new way to approach the problem and define a tactic for how to think about it.

The Approach

Home and Work are good contexts to start with, but I added a few more that would provide the catch-alls for the tasks that would eventually make their way into OmniFocus.

Along with "Home" and "Work", I added

• "Errands"
• "Shopping"
• "People"
• "Waiting"
• "Phone"

These seven groups form the basis of how I codify every task that makes it into OmniFocus.

There are still some hairs to split, surely. It's not a perfect system and I've come to expect that no GTD system will be completely perfect for every task you could possibly throw at it. As long as you know how to use the system and it gives you something to lean on, it's a good system.

One of the things that still bother me is the fact that Errands, on the surface, looks like it could be combined into Shopping. In truth, almost all of my shopping is done online these days so my "Shopping" context is generally things I want to buy from online home brew places or Amazon.

I consider errands something that pile up and need to be done outside of the house, generally quickly and efficiently. To add a bit more granularity (and give me the ability to add some location-aware fences for the iPhone version of OmniFocus), I have added sub-contexts in the Errands bucket like "Pet shop", "Hardware store", and "Supermarket". If anything doesn't fall into one of those three common categories, I will add it to the "Errands" context itself.

My phone is something that is always with me. As such, it warrants its own context because it neither falls into the "Work" context or the "Home" context neatly. Since the primary function of Contexts is to group activities, allowing you to act upon tasks that cross projects and use your time effectively, my "Phone" context contains reminders for phone calls I need to make that span many projects. When I sit down to make phone calls during the day, usually when I get a break during meetings, I can make several in one sitting and avoid wasting precious time cycles.

My "Home" context is a very straightforward one. It contains the following sub-contexts:

• Mac (with sub-sub-contexts "Online" and "Email")

That's it.

The "Mac" context is simply reminders to send specific emails like "Arrange visit with John" or things I need to remember to do when I'm online like pay bills, buy concert tickets or do some specific research.

All other tasks fall into the "Home" context and that's ok -- no need to make it more complicated than it has to be.

The Work Context

I think where I depart from the mainstream of OmniFocus users is my work-related contexts. Setting these contexts up took time, lots of thought and a close examination of how I really need OmniFocus to function for me throughout the day. While reading the following, realize that how I set things up is a direct reflection of the power of OmniFocus in that the tailored nature of my work contexts are clearly pretty personalized. I love that OmniFocus gives me that kind of control and flexibility.

In my day job, I manage software development teams. These teams span many disciplines and skill sets and the people who work for me are highly skilled, technical individuals. In some ways, they all need their own tailored approach and each one is juggling many projects or requests at once.

Because of this, I needed OmniFocus to gather the various and disparate tasks from several projects and allow me to focus my attention when I'm speaking with one of the developers I work with.

The contexts I created under "Work" are the following:

• Computer (with the same sub-contexts as my Home/Mac context)
• People
• Thinking
• Meetings

Under "People" is where the fun starts.

I created one sub-context for each department that I interact with -- Development, QA, IT, Management. Under each one of those headings, I created one context for each person I deal with frequently. Doing this created roughly thirty contexts.

That sounds a little crazy to most GTD grognards, I'm sure, but let me present an example and maybe it will make some sense.

One of my managers, L., is huge help in managing pieces of multiple projects. Often I'll need to talk to her about specific phases of those projects or to discuss planning and execution throughout the week.

In one particular project, I may need L. to make sure specs get sent to a team overseas. In another, she may need me to sign some paperwork for a trip or an expense report. In a third project, I may need a recap of a meeting she ran that I wasn't able to attend.

Each one of these tasks are things I logged in a particular project, but the context in common for each of those tasks is L. In other words, she is where these tasks get done for me.

Have you had the common problem where you run into someone in the hall on the way to a meeting and say "Oh, hey. There was something I needed to ask you. It was really important but... I don't remember what it was..."? Yeah, well, that type of thing used to be common for me but it never happens to me anymore, thanks to OmniFocus.

I take out my phone, open OmniFocus, find their context and everything I need to talk to them about, no matter how many projects the topics span, is right there. I can even check each item off as I cover it, which is obviously incredibly satisfying for a nerd.

Of course, I have actual tasks that need to get done too. The context I tend to use for that is "Computer" since these tasks usually involve sending an email, writing a document, doing some research, etc.

My "Meetings" context is a catch-all for things I need to do in an upcoming meeting. I only have one context for this as I tend to complete them throughout the day. I check this context everytime I'm in a meeting to make sure I cover everything I need to cover. If anything lingers too long here, I'll usually end up assigning it to a better, more focused context and finishing it up later.

Wrap Up

I could go on for a lot longer about Contexts because they are so key to being effective in GTD and OmniFocus; in fact, I cut about 900 words from this to make things a little clearer after several re-readings. Almost 3000 words on Contexts probably would have been overkill for one article. I'm sure the concept of Contexts will be revisited on this site in the future, providing more focus for more subtle points or outlining something new I'm trying.

Up next, part 3 in the series will explore another pivotal piece of the OmniFocus puzzle - the Review. Hopefully, not too long after that, part 4 will explore one of my favorite parts of OmniFocus - Perspectives.

Thanks for reading and keep the good feedback coming via email 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.

Beginner's OmniFocus Series: (#1) Setting up Projects and Single-Action Lists

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.

Setting Up OmniFocus: The Initial Capture

When you're faced with a white page in a new tool, using a new methodology, it's immensely difficult to decide what to do first. Sure, you know you want to end up with a full list of your projects, all broken elegantly into tasks with well-planned due dates. But how do you actually get to that point?

My first attempts were halting stabs at setting up ornately-nested projects and folders; those all got deleted. Eventually, I got back to something resembling that type of arrangement but the steps I took to get there -- the journey -- was key to getting it set up properly.

The first step on this journey was to do a full capture straight into my OmniFocus Inbox. It took several hours in a quiet room and there were many pauses where I assumed I was done. I'd settle down, happy about a job well done, only to think of another set of tasks that I had forgotten and another round of furious typing.

When I say "full capture" I am speaking about dumping the entire contents of your actual brain into your new, outboard brain. No task is insignificant. No area of your life should be neglected. As Kourosh Dini says, (I'm paraphrasing) if your task manager only has tasks you hate doing in it, you'll eventually hate your task manager and I couldn't agree more.

I put tasks related to work, of course, but I also included home projects and vacation planning. I included day trips I've always wanted to plan and restaurants I always forget about when we are deciding where to go to out to eat. I added items related to people from work, even if it was about non-related work conversations I've been meaning to have. I dug up names of old friends I wanted to reach out to, appointments I had been meaning to make, games I've always wanted to play, books I had in my current reading list that needed focus to finish.

It didn't matter what it was, I just entered it in a way that was clear and concisely described as a task. I didn't just put "England trip". I would enter "Take a look at flights to England" or "Ballpark expenses for UK trip". Not making something a well-defined task gives you a reason to ignore it later.

Remember, this isn't the final state of things and these disparate items will become coherent, cohesive lists of tasks soon enough. After dumping as much as you can think of into your Inbox, the next job ahead of you is wrestling these into "Projects".

Creating Projects and Single-Action Lists

There are two different kinds of project paradigms in OmniFocus:

• The Project
• The Single Action List

Within the Project paradigm, you can break projects down further into Parallel projects and Sequential Projects.

To start making some sense of the tasks you put in your Inbox, you're going to have to take the plunge and group similar or related task into logical areas. That's where projects come in.

In the GTD method, a project is a series of tasks that need to be done in order consider the project completed. You can approach projects from two different directions. You can create a project like the aforementioned "England Trip", then fill it with the steps required to fly to England and stay there for a period of time. Alternatively, you can create tasks for yourself and group them into a project you call "England Trip". They accomplish the same goal.

I've often had single tasks balloon into full Projects after giving some serious thought to what I needed to do to complete them. Don't be afraid to break things down as far as necessary. The goal here is that each task represents an easily-accomplished, singular event that you can do in a few minutes. If it turns out to be more than that, break it into the requisite steps or make a new project out of it.

OmniFocus is flexible enough to allow you to have sub-projects within a bigger project and move things around at-will so there's no penalty for working out this process organically. It's a really a good way to get started so dive in.

Skim through your Inbox of captured items and start looking for patterns. Don't think about where things are done. (That will come later, in my Beginner's Series post on "Contexts".) Think about the end goal of a set of tasks and group them accordingly with the end goal being the name of the project.

The aforementioned "England Trip" is an obvious one. It ends when you get home from England, presumably, but there are a myriad of tasks that go into such a trip, from researching airlines to booking the trip to planning lodging, etc. Each one of these things could be a task, or a series of tasks making up a sub-project.

You can physically group these tasks in any number of ways, the simplest of which is to go to the "File" menu and selecting "Add Project" and then drag the tasks from the task listing on the right to the new project on the left. From there, you can drag them into any order you want but I suggest you put them in the order you envision them getting done.

At this point you can decide if this project is going to be structured in such a way that there are some steps that are prerequisites to getting others done. If this is the case, you can make the project "sequential". Setting a project up as a sequential project means that the steps will remain unavailable until the task before it is completed. This is a handy way to approach projects if there is a well-defined set of milestone tasks, with each needing to be complete before the next can begin because OmniFocus will hide unavailable tasks in most views. While this doesn't sound that helpful now, wait until you have hundreds of tasks in OmniFocus.*

The default, and more common way, to set up a project is "parallel". This makes all tasks available to you to be completed at any time. I tend to keep projects in this mode unless there is a very strict path to getting something or there is no physical way to complete on thing before another. For instance, if I need to find another person's phone number to call them before the task asking me to call them, it makes sense that it must come first. If there is no clear precedence, just leave the project set as a parallel project for now.

If you set up a set of tasks as sub-projects within a larger project, you can set just those to sequential as well. This is yet another example of where the tool is incredibly flexible.

"Single-Action Lists" are special types of projects that aren't really meant to be completed. They are a holding area for single tasks with no real overarching goals in mind. They are created in much the same way as standard projects. Under the "File" menu, select "Add Single-Action List". From there you can add tasks as normal.

I have a "Home Single-Action List" and a "Work Single-Action List". These have simple one-off items in them that don't really fit into another project but aren't really big enough to warrant a project themselves.

Things like "Update website password" or "Give the dog heartworm meds" are things I definitely don't want to forget, but they don't need to be a project all on their own. The worry here is that these single-action lists become dumping grounds for ill-defined projects. Try your best to really think about what you put in these lists and clear them out regularly with your Review process (the subject of yet-another future post) so things don't collect there and linger.

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The paradigm of "the Project" is meant to group like items and give you a focus to use as a goal. By taking those items, ordering them in a meaningful way, and allowing yourself to see the trajectory of the project laid out as atomic elements each needing your attention, you'll gain a much tighter control over your time and your mind.

That sounds heavy, but doing a full capture to OmniFocus, organize all of the things that have been hanging over your head, and getting those items into a system you trust, it makes you feel like a weight has been lifted from your shoulders.

At work, when asked about the progress of a particular assignment, I can tell at a glance what's been completed and what is yet to be done. I can tell when tasks were completed, salient notes (stored in the handy Notes field for each task) about the progress or results of the task and how much is left to do.

As we move on in the next part of the Beginner's Series on OmniFocus, we will focus on Contexts.

Contexts are an incredible piece of the GTD puzzle and, when you understand their power and how they relate to tasks and projects, you'll likely never think about task management the same way again.

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* You can use a great app called OmniStats to gather information about your OmniFocus database. For instance, I have 726 tasks in my database with 498 complete. Sweet!