The following began as a comment to a thread over at the OmniFocus blog …
There are likely many ways of using the task management software OmniFocus, but as I’ve been using it for a while, I’ve adapted my own methods and thought it worthwhile to make mention of them. OmniFocus is an excellent program which is likely the one I use most (even including my internet browser).
For a basic guide, I refer the reader to the video at the Omnifocus page linked above. For the advanced practitioner, read on …
Have a Focus
The GTD method is excellent in that it respects the extremely valuable resource of attention. Carrying that mindset into OmniFocus can help a lot. My main focus in using OmniFocus is to get past treading water and instead into projects I need to do and, better yet, those I really enjoy.
Open Windows
For most tasks, I assign a start date to things I want to do today. Some of these are on repeat – daily, weekly or otherwise. It is a good skeleton structure around which everything can revolve. These tasks can be as simple as “check the mail” or complex like “work on billing” – broken down into individual tasks, etc …
There are usually at least 2-4 windows open :
- The main window and my center of focus: “General” aka treading-water which is basically a checklist that if I get it done, I’ll have tread water successfully (bleh).
- General Project View (just to have readily accessible)
- One flagged project I need to get done (usually work related …) (minimized)
- One flagged project I want to get done (music, video games … ) (minimized)
Flagged projects are those that I want to remain in my consciousness. I try not to have more than 5 flagged at any one time (I often break this rule, ah well).
Treading Water vs Moving Ahead
The goal for me in getting things done is in getting past treading water. The treading water window is my main window. It carries all of my repeated actions and those things that I have assigned to start today. It is a context view with the “start date” as the grouping characteristic and “available” as the grouping filter. Anything that really needs a due date gets one, but I try to stay away from that as much as possible. I think I’m allergic to the orange and red.
My goal is to get through this window so that I can do either number 3 or 4 listed above. This way, I separate those things that are treading water and those things that will move me ahead either in work or in fun.
If there are a group of tasks in a particular project I need to do in a day, I will mark one of them with the start date and then use the alt-option-r function (Show in Planning Mode) to jump to the Project and double click the Project to have it in its own window. I’ll then return to the general “Treading Water” window. This way, I have that project ready to go as its own entity and the treading water window is still available.
Whenever something I’d like to get done today comes to mind, I can get to quick entry and enter today’s date as the start date and it will show in my main context view. It will wait for me until I feel ready to go back there from my focused project.
Using Project View
A folder labeled “Routine Maintenance” rests at the top of my project list. Inside I have projects labeled “Daily”, “Weekly”, and “Monthly.” These all carry simple tasks that are set to repeat at the interval of their namesakes. Things like practice piano, clear the laptop desktop, etc…
Separately, there is also a folder at the bottom of the Projects called “Omnifocus Maintenance” with one project inside called Routine OmniFocus Organization. Inside this are the following:
- Review “Waiting for …” (repeated daily)
- Review “due” (repeated weekly)
- OmniFocus Review (repeated weekly)
- Review Projects On Hold (repeated monthly)
- Archive Completed Projects (repeated monthly)
- Flagged Projects Review (repeated daily)
All have “OmniFocus” set as their context. The reason for the placement of the “Routine Maintenance” folder at the top and the “OmniFocus Maintenance” at bottom of the Project view is in how they present in the Context view. I prefer my daily repeating tasks to show up first, my projects that require some action today to show up next, and my cleanup of the task system itself to show up at the end.
Areas of Responsibility and “Levels of Consciousness”
Areas of responsibility are folders that have folders and projects within them. These are projects that I have put tasks together and wait. There are several levels of “consciousness” that the projects here exist in. Here my psychiatrist roots show I guess.
- At the most “unconscious” are those that are completed or dropped. I rarely review these if ever.
- At the next level are those On Hold. As noted above, these are reviewed monthly. When reviewed, they either remain On Hold, are Dropped, or are made Active.
- The active state is essentially a “pre-conscious” state meaning that they are ready for recall, but are not necessarily my main focus. These are reviewed weekly. They may either go On Hold, remain Active, or become Flagged.
- Flagged items are considered in my conscious focus. These are reviewed daily and what I attempt to get to at any point.
- Finally there are those that are quite rare as both flagged and repeated – An example of this would be a major exam that requires long study. This would be flagged (occupying one of the 5 flagged spots) and repeated as a daily task – showing up in my “General” treading water window.
Review considerations
When reviewing, consider reviewing both your projects and your contexts. Are there better contexts or descriptions of contexts you could be using? Sometimes I just use “online” as a context when I’d be much better off using something like specific sites such as “amazon” or “website administration.”
Overall, the only way the system works is if it works for you. This means that as you change, you’ll need to adapt the system to work well for your quirks and eccentricities. As an example, I don’t like to see “take out the garbage” until later in the day so the process went from:
- I don’t like to see that (for several weeks it stood at this step)
- Move it to 6pm (~after work) (I didn’t like this either and it stood for a while)
- Move to 8pm (after dinner, before the family goes to bed) and change to “Prepare garbage” (meaning getting it ready to take out on the way to work the next morning) and “take out garbage” as repeating at 7am – (which didn’t look so icky anymore as it was now prepared and I’ve saved a trip downstairs).
Using Perspectives
As I have several places I tend to be – home and 2 offices each with their own characteristics – using perspectives can be helpful. One office does not have ready online access so it is un-highlighted from the rest as well as the home computer, etc. It is saved as a perspective. This perspective now becomes my main treading water window until I return home when I can select that perspective.
I think it’s clear that I enjoy task management, and I hope this helps any of you using OmniFocus. 
See also:
- Part II: How to Use OmniFocus – Integrating Email
- Part III: How to Use OmniFocus – Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground
- Part IV: Using OmniFocus – Unlocking Future Projects
- Part V: Using OmniFocus – Projects, Attention, and Conditions Continued
- Part I: How to Use OmniFocus (a guide for the advanced user)
- Part II: How to Use OmniFocus - Integrating Email
- Part III: How to Use OmniFocus - Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground
- Part IV: Using OmniFocus - Unlocking Future Projects
- Part V: Using OmniFocus - Projects, Attention, and Conditions Continued
- The Power of Repetition - Creating Flow, Clearing Clutter, and Avoiding Deadline Pressure
- OmniFocus Quick tip: Perspective Links
- OmniFocus QuickTip: One Very Useful Shortcut
- Using OmniFocus: Context Focus and Flagged Projects Re-Visited
- OmniFocus - Customizing Perspectives on the iPhone
Celsius1414 on April 28, 2009
Very interesting, thanks. I was googling around looking for some thoughts on using start dates, as well as just generally recalibrating my methods.
Damon Casey on April 29, 2009
A nice article on how you use OmniFocus, I’m always interested in seeing how people use it as there’s always something new to learn. A question: in the Treading Water vs Moving Ahead section, you mention double-clicking a project to open it in its own window when you’re in planning mode. How are you making this work, from a preference setting or menu option?
When I double-click a project in the main window, that project becomes focused rather than opened in a new window. I’ve checked the Preferences and can’t find anything to change the behaviour of double-clicking.
Kourosh on April 29, 2009
Hi Damon and Robert,
Glad you like the article. Damon, that seems odd. I just tested it myself, and I get a new window with the project focused. Looking through the preferences, I, too, couldn’t find a toggle for this.
If I do ctrl-cmd-f I get the behavior you describe, i.e. the same window with a focus on the selected task. If I double click – either in project or context modes – I get a new window with the project of the highlighted task in focus.
One thing you could do is to take an extra step and press cmd-n to open a new window and then ctrl-cmd-f to focus from there?
Case Larsen on April 30, 2009
Thanks for this writeup. I’ve been using Omnifocus for at least a year now, and am only learning how to take advantage of the implicit secondary sorting of actions — especially through uses described like you have.
By secondary sorting I mean the manual sorting of folders reflected in the sorting of actions when grouped by something other than folders.
Damon Casey on April 30, 2009
Thanks for the tip Kourosh. I was wrong about double-clicking a project in planning view only focusing on that project in the main window. My main OmniFocus window is maximised across the entire screen and I expected a new window would be smaller when displaying the project. It was only when I went to the Window menu and noticed there were multiple windows open that it behaves as you explained.
Kourosh on April 30, 2009
I’m thinking of following up this post with more on OmniFocus’ use. I have some ideas, but are there any particular points anyone would want me to address?
Damon Casey on April 30, 2009
I’m interested in how people are doing their reviews (daily, weekly, someday etc.), how they make use of multiple windows in the reviews and so on. Also how perspectives are used for reviews but also for other uses too. Does that help?
Kourosh on April 30, 2009
That definitely helps, Damon. I’ll see what I can come up with over the next few days or so.
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Sibo on May 10, 2009
Interesting article, thanks!
But how do I show all done tasks of today?
It’s frustrating, if they’ll disappear and I can’t see,
what I’ve achieved in one day.
Regards!
Kourosh on May 10, 2009
Hi Sibo,
You have a couple of options available to you. If you want your completed posts to stick around all day, go to the action filter (Shift-Cmd-v or press the sunglasses on the tool bar if visible). From there, select “All” and you will see items whether they are completed or not.
If you only want to see the completed tasks until clean up, then go to preferences (Cmd-,), go to the Data Tab (second tab) and uncheck “Immediately hid completed items”.
Hope this helps!
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Sharon on July 6, 2009
Hi Kourosh I don’t like the orange and red and I knew right away that I had to change it to something else. I like the purple colour best so I changed next actions to blue, due soon to purple and overdue to black with a purple background.
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Robert on July 20, 2009
I’m really enjoying this series. I’ve been using OmniFocus since it’s beta release, but have only skimmed the surface of possibilities.
Some screenshots of your various windows/perspectives would greatly help grasp some of your setup.
Thanks for these.
Kourosh on July 21, 2009
Hi Sharon,
More than the colors themselves, I prefer to avoid having due dates – though, of course, they’re unavoidable at times. If the first time I run into a task is when it shows up as a number in the sidebar, then I think something is off. I’d rather deal with tasks in advance if possible.
Robert,
Good idea – I just set up a few more screenshots throughout the posts. Hope they help.
Cheers
Jesse David Hollington on July 30, 2009
Again, great write up. I also tend to avoid due dates as it seems rather un-GTD-like unless things actually have a true “hard landscape.” If I’m completing my reviews properly, I find that things will get done when they’re supposed to, and due dates are only necessary when there is some external critical factor affecting when a task needs to be done (ie, an actual deadline or some other crucial thing that will be missed if the task isn’t done by a certain time or date).
Your use of start dates to build a “today” list is interesting as well. I also use start dates extensively, but I’ve moved into the habit of using flags to highlight those sorts of things that need to be in my consciousness (in a similar manner to what you do with projects). The distinction for me again comes to the iPhone client: It has a built-in Flagged perspective that allows me to see my “hot list” for actions that I need to be working on. What I like about this compared to other task management apps is that there’s no artificial “Today” constraint on this list. I don’t need to “postpone” or “re-schedule” tasks that don’t get done today — they can remain flagged and the resulting list simply becomes more of a list of things I need/want to get done “over the next couple of days.”
I basically boil my list down to several perspectives to assist in my review process:
Review: Show me everything in project view except for completed tasks, grouped by last reviewed, suitable for my weekly/monthly reviews.
Strategic: Show me all available projects/tasks in Project view, grouped by project.
Tactical: Show me all available tasks in Context view, grouped by context.
Today: Show me available flagged and due items in Context view, ungrouped. I get a flat list to action, but can still filter by context from the left-hand context list.
Hotlist: Same as Today, but opens in a separate basic window with no headers or sidebar. Just a simple flat list of my immediate action items that I can tuck into a corner somewhere while going through them.
I also frequently flag my repeating routine items to keep them on the Today/Hotlist when they come up, since I put so much extra weight on the flagged status. The Tactical, Today and Hotlist views won’t show them as they have future start dates, but when they do come up, they’re immediately dropped into the list for action.
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Andrew on January 7, 2010
Kourosh, Thanks for sharing your approach to GTD and OF, my journey along the same path is sure being made easier by your generosity. I love the idea of using a start date (rather than a due date) to indicate an action that I’m keen to get done today, but I’m having a problem with the (treading water) perspective you’ve shared above. The great majority of my actions don’t have a start date attributed to them, yet the first group of tasks I see when using this perspective is “Start any time” – it includes all of the “unallocated” tasks. I can click on the triangle to the left of the group title to hide them, and the items then marked as “Start today” etc are then visible. Is this the intended way of using this perspective, or have I missed something?
Kourosh on January 7, 2010
Hi Andrew, I’m glad that this has been helpful. I believe that you indeed have the method I suggest correctly done. There are a significant number of tasks that are hidden by the Start Any Time triangle. The Start Today is your Treading Water or Routine Maintenance list.
The method you see here has the disadvantage of no context groupings, at least until OmniFocus has a view that only shows items with a start date assigned.
There is another method that I have been toying with towards keeping a treading water list. If you keep a folder specific to routine maintenance tasks, or have projects with only these sorts of repeating tasks, you can select them, focus on them, and then go to context view. This will effectively hide all of the tasks that are not relevant to the routine tasks, and allows you to group by contexts again.
The disadvantage of this latter route, is that you no longer have the “tickler file” capacity of the route mentioned above. In other words, if I were to have a non-routine task that I wanted to look at, say a week from now, it would show up in the Treading Water view mentioned in the post, but not in the view that I describe in the paragraph above.
This idea may warrant a post of its own, but hopefully, I’ve described it well.