Simplify

First some background, I always have way more to do than I can possibly get done. I’ve been using OmniFocus for a couple years now (since May 2007) to track everyting and really can’t imagine how I would get things done without it. Today, I just made a pretty significant change in how I use it.

Here’s what I was doing before. During my weekly review, I would assign due dates to the things I wanted to get done during the upcoming week. I would assign dates such that my projects were spread evenly across the week. But I was always too optimistic. I rarely got done everything I planned to.

As a result, I ended up with a bunch of red tasks that really weren’t overdue. I in turn stopped paying attention to color (one of the very useful feedback cues that OmniFocus provides). I also spent a lot of time scanning through my overdue items, cherry picking the most important ones. It was a GTD nightmare.

So here’s what I just did to fix it.

First, I set up review schedules for each of my projects. I wasn’t using this at all before. Then I set up my “Planning” perspective (my default Project view) to be grouped by “Next Review” so my most neglected projects appeared first. In my weekly planning, I’ll start here.

Then I got rid of the due dates for things that really weren’t due at any time but I had added a due date to force me to get them done. Instead, I now plan to during my weekly review, identify a couple of projects that I want to tackle that week and set Start dates for each of them, much like how I set Due dates before, spreading them out across the week.

But here’s the key difference. I changed my “To Do” perspective (my default for context view) to group by start date. I collapsed the start any time category because those are the things I want to ignore and can now see just the tasks that I set out to do this week sorted by when. The best part is if I fall behind nothing turns red, except for the things that are truly past due because most things (that don’t really have due dates) don’t have due dates.

If things slip, then the next week I’ll just add start dates to fewer items to allow me to catch up. Or I might decide something else is more important and remove start dates from some projects and add them to others.

The benefit of this change are the following:

• No more screens full of red tasks that aren’t really past due.
• I’ll now pay attention to the things that are truly past due.
• Start dates are way more pleasant than due dates
• I like change.

We’ll see how it goes after a few weeks, but for now I’m excited.