I’m finally able to give a run to your idea of flags on maintenance tasks alongside the Flagged or Due context view. It seems like a very neat way of combining the views. I’ll give it a week or so to see how it runs …

- Kourosh

I guess I should go and actually do something now that I’ve spent a fair chunk of my day organising myself.

However, I tend to confine setting future start dates to those actions that either can’t be done at all until a future date, or those I’ve consciously put off until later (low priority things that I don’t want to think about). I’m fairly selective about what I apply start dates to: I have to be sure I don’t want that item on my radar before the start date or at least my next weekly review.

I most commonly use start dates for single actions, which I have a lot of, since I use Omnifocus for managing everything from writing a book to taking out the garbage. Actual projects are more likely to just get put on hold and then picked up during my next weekly review unless they actually do have a concrete start date.

However, I’ve also made much more judicious use of contexts in order to keep the lists smaller during my daily “tactical” review and allow me to keep a better focus on what’s important. For example, my “Office” context used to get massive, since I threw in everything I could logically do while sitting at my desk. I’ve since refined that into “frame-of-mind” areas, which are particularly useful for lower-priority actions that I’m only going to do when I’m in those modes. For instance, I have contexts such as “Leisure” for things like books I want to read, movies I want to see, etc, and “Research” for things I want to read up on, new software I want to check out, etc. These don’t get checked at all during my daily review, since I’m not going to find any items in there that would be important enough to “force” me into those contexts — they’re contexts I’m going to specifically visit only when I’m in the appropriate “mode.”

The final key here is the sorting and reorganization that I do in planning mode during my weekly review. Reorganizing the items in my single-action buckets and reorganizing my projects sets the order in which the items appear in my actual contexts. Since each context is in descending order by priority and I can only do so much in a day, I simply work through each context until I’ve flagged a realistic number of items and then ignore the rest.

Thanks again, this is very helpful.
Tim Jeffries´s last blog ..Is Vitamin Water Really Good For You?

My weekly review sets up my actions and their contexts for the week, and then I do my daily reviews simply by looking at which contexts I have any chance of “visiting” that day — much easier during a daily review as I usually have a good idea of where I’m able to be that day, both mentally and physically. I skip over contexts that are not expected to be available to me and contexts that I use strictly for “only-when-I’m-there” types of tasks.

Another trick I use during my weekly and monthly reviews is to prioritize my projects and single actions in my buckets simply by dragging them up or down in the planning view. All other things being equal, items in each context are sorted based on their relative positions from the planning view. My “Tactical” context view is sorted by due date within each context, so the really urgent things come up near the top, and then everything else is ordered according to its place within the planning view. I should note that I rarely have available tasks with due dates that are far into the future — those tasks are either blocked by a higher-priority action in their project, or their blocked by a start date (if it’s not due for another couple of months, chances are I don’t have to think about it until closer to that date). Ergo, my “due” sorting in context view only shows near-term tasks with due dates (usually due within a week).

Note that I *do* flag items during my weekly review, but in those cases I also attach start dates to them so that they don’t show up until the date that I expect to do them. For example, if I know that I’m going to need to do something on Wednesday, I’ll flag it and then put a start date of Wednesday on it during my weekly review. That way it stays hidden until I’m ready to deal with it. Once upon a time I used this in place of daily reviews, but that degree of forecasting quickly became unwieldy and impractical.

My daily reviews done in context mode usually don’t take me more than 5-10 minutes even on a day where I have to look at a lot of contexts. Most days it’s even faster since I know I’ll only be able to “visit” specific contexts on any given day.

I’m not doing a full review each day, I’m just looking over my projects trying to work out which tasks I’d like to get done today.

I guess I could probably create a perspective where I just look at the next actions for my projects and select from that list. Although I find that many of my actions are in single action lists as they don’t relate directly to any larger project and in that case the Next Action list isn’t very helpful.
Tim Jeffries´s last blog ..Is Vitamin Water Really Good For You?

Reviews can be done daily if you wanted, but unless you’re vigilant about keeping a low number of high frequency reviews, it may quickly become overwhelming.

Up until recently I haven’t had a daily review, only a weekly one, and so I used the Flag to mark all items I wanted to get done in the week ahead. This meant that I almost never reached the end of the list. This series of posts has inspired me to get serious about daily reviews and set myself some more achievable goals for each day. However now I am finding that in my daily review I need to look through too much of OmniFocus to decide what I’d like to achieve for the day. Does that make sense? Any suggestions? If there was a second flagging type option that I could use in a weekly review to plan for the week ahead that would seem ideal.

Thanks
Tim Jeffries´s last blog ..Is Vitamin Water Really Good For You?

The main issue, as Jesse points out, is that flags have no inherent meaning. They are what you make of them.

The same goes for contexts. While Jesse has a system worked out where contexts are about a frame of mind (which may be a better system, in fact), I tend to use them as the tool, place or person that is needed for the task. My own maintenance tasks have migrated since this post to be in a single folder dedicated to maintenance. This way, I have all the maintenance tasks separate from the other projects, but I can still use their contexts as I would for any other.

Much of OmniFocus is about adapting it to your personal method of working. As long as you can set tasks to appear when you want them to and not when you don’t, you are doing fine.