Posts Tagged ‘GTD’

OmniFocus: Getting Better at Projects

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

I’ve noticed over the past couple of months that my usage of OmniFocus has trended back toward a cluttered to do list. Sure my actions are sorted into projects and contexts, but I never seem to complete a project. What’s going on?

During a recent review session, I realized I had way too many projects. I was using projects as categories of single actions. I had projects at work for each department (Sales, Account Management, Engineering, etc) and for each product. Every thing that went into OmniFocus was a single action within one of these “folders”, even if a set of single actions were actually related to each other. So even though I happily ticked off actions, I never completed projects. After all, when will the Sales or Engineering projects be done?

I was making the same mistake for personal things as well. I had a project called Chores, another project called Of Interest to collect things I wanted to check out later. Again, I’m not sure I’ve ever completed a project.

So what’s the big deal? I was still getting stuff done.

I realized that I wasn’t very focused. I had no way of knowing which actions or projects were important. There was no priority, I was using OmniFocus to store everything (a good thing), but wasn’t using it to tell me what was my priority (a bad thing).

So I’ve changed the way I use OmniFocus yet again.

I have a new rule. When creating a project, I now force myself to think through when will this project be done. What am I trying to accomplish? So each project has a clear goal with an end in sight. I’m also limiting myself to having only a handful of active projects for work and a handful for personal stuff, so I can really focus on the priorities.

So for work, I switched from having projects that reflected departments to these projects: 2010 Planning, Finalize Partnership Agreement, Get Company Y Using our Product. That’s it. Only 3 active projects. I won’t activate another project until one of these is complete. If something comes up, I’ll activate it at the cost of deactivating one of these.

For personal stuff, i went from having projects like Chores, Of Interest and Hockey to Move Downtown, Launch Sharks App and Apply to MBA Programs. Again, those are the top 3. If something else wants to squeeze in there, one of those three have to move out.

No more committing to too much. No more thinking I can do it all. 3 priorities at work, 3 priorities at home. It seems so simple.

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OmniFocus: Changing My Strategy

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

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.

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Schedule a Time and Place to Get Things Done

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Over at Zen Habits there is a great post, 7 Powerful Steps to Overcoming Resistance and Actually Getting Stuff Done. One of his 7 steps for overcoming procrastination is to schedule a time and place to get things done. This is great advice and something that I have put into place recently to get this blog going.

I’ve wanted to start this blog for months. But I never seemed to find the time. Recently, I started forcing myself to wake up an hour earlier so that I could spend an hour each morning working on this blog. This works for me for two reasons:

  1. I hate waking up early. By forcing myself to get up and work, I don’t procrastinate or get distracted. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth the early morning wake-up call.
  2. First thing in the morning means I have no other distractions. I don’t read email, blogs, news, etc. The first thing I do is work on my own blog. All those other things have to wait until I’ve completed my blog task for the day.

When I was in high school, my journalism class had a motto: Make it happen! Sometimes, the easiest way to make something happen is simply to schedule it. What can you schedule?

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OmniFocus: Getting Things Out of My Brain and Into a Reliable System

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

There are dozens of task management applications out there. But the ones I’ve tried in the past have all forced me to change the way I like to work and as a result I try them for a few weeks and then give up. It’s too hard to change my behavior to fit the arbitrary design of an application.

This all changed about 8 months ago when I started using OmniFocus. This little app by OmniGroup supports my current way of working so well, that these days I’d be absolutely lost without it. It’s quite simple, I keep a list of projects and tasks for each project. When entering a task, I add a context (ie. work, home, online, errands, etc) and due date. The app allows me to view my tasks by project or by context. So when I’m planning out projects I use project view. When I’m ready to do work, I switch to context view and look at the things I can get done based on my context.

For example, each morning before leaving home, I see what I need to do for that day. At home, I use it to keep track of such mundane things as trash day, when to scoop the litter box and when to review my produce delivery.

At work, I use it for everything. I have tasks set up to remind me to send out weekly update emails, to prepare for scheduled meetings, what the next steps are on various projects, etc. When someone asks me to do something, I immediately add a task for it and get back to whatever I was working on before the interuption. I can also send emails from Mail.app to OmniFocus, which is a tremendous help in managing my inbox.

I’ve even started to use it to get me into the habit of doing fun stuff. I’ve set up tasks to remind me to contact friends I haven’t seen in a long time and have them repeat so that I don’t go too long without reconnecting. I have projects for dream vacations with tasks that get me one step closer to making them realities. I even have a couple of inspirational projects like one to motivate me to become a better hockey player, with tasks like working out and eating healthier.

What this has done, is allowed me to focus on the task at hand instead of worrying about all the little things that I don’t want to forget. OmniFocus remembers everything for me, leaving me to live my life.

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