Useful Lists
We can easily be overwhelmed by looking at even a realistic list of things we’d like to do today. This is particularly the case if there are many small tasks. A good list is one we can easily review in a short period of time so that we can make a clear decision about what to do next. For this to be the case, we generally need a short list.
However, this pushes against two other productivity tenets:
- Tasks should be clear and specific.
- One should offload as much as possible into a trusted system.
Offloading everything as clear and specific tasks can quickly generate a huge list. While we can use flags to highlight certain tasks, we would easily create the same problem by flagging too many.
Sessions vs. Tasks
Instead, consider organizing your work by sessions.1 I use a custom perspective, called the Dashboard, to organize my intended daily sessions of work. Here is an example:
See the Dashboard settings in the footnote below.2
The Dashboard Perspective functions as a central hub. Any major projects or flows of habit appear here. My intention is to complete the list before the end of the workday. In this example, you can see that there are 5 general areas of work I intend to visit. Each “task” carries a link to the batched tasks I care to do for today.3:
Some tasks are batched by project. Some are batched by context. All are batched by whatever criteria I find most useful. The brevity of the Dashboard Perspective allows me to make a quick decision as to what I would like to do next without having to wade through the smaller tasks.
In its years, my use of the Dashboard Perspective has evolved. When it began, it was more about doing all the little things that I needed to so I could get to the major things. Later, I added my major projects so they would all sit together. When the perspective was at its busiest, I had dozens of specific, clearly worded tasks in this one list. I would rarely visit any others. While the system “worked”, I also remember feeling harried. sometimes looking at the list over and over again. Thankfully, as my “system” began to be more about my own habits, individual tasks could be removed.
The Dashboard now represents sessions of work more so than individual tasks. There are the occasional exceptions4, but specific tasks tend to be more associated with projects and contexts and remain unflagged. I go to them as a part of the flow from flagged tasks as shown above.
- Sessions are a more fundamental component of work than the task, project, or context. Defining: A Session is the time, space, and attention used in developing a workflow.↩︎
- The Dashboard Perspective displays anything Flagged or Due Soon and sorts them by Project:
- Please note, this is not a GTD concept. In fact, if I understand it correctly, GTD shuns the day’s task list entirely and avoids the “general” wording of tasks I use above. But this system has worked well for me for several years now. ↩︎
- Sometimes I do still add specific tasks to the Dashboard perspective. These often represent:
- tasks that haven’t found a way into batching or
- tasks that are due soon.
For example, if my pen is out of ink, “Refill pen” might get a flag. If it can wait, though, I can give it a context of “File & Flow : Home” which I visit weekly based on a flagged reminder task “Clear: Home Filing”.↩︎
This is a really interesting concept. I would love to learn more. Do you have any input on best practices for how to structure your folders and projects that feed into this perspective?
Steve – don’t know if you have read Kourosh’s books, but they changed the way I use Omnifocus.
Hi Chris, I have not read the books yet. I am definitely considering it.
Seriously. If you want to take your use of OF to several levels higher, read th books. Also, check his webinar out on Tim Stringer’s Learnomnifocus site also. Simply brilliant.
Does the book go into more detail on this concept of sessions?
Steve … IMO the books goes into the underlying layers of the dashboard and gives you many ideas that you can immediately put to use, even beyond the dashboard concept. Highly recommended read.
I hope to do a post on folders and projects some time in the coming months. I’m currently working on something that uses the session as a centerpiece, but that’s at least a few months away.
In the meantime, yes, I do get into the structure of the session in either Creating Flow and Workflow Mastery, though I come at them from different angles. Creating Flow is about using OmniFocus in that context and Workflow Mastery is more about the mindset.
Thanks for the feedback Kourosh. I bought the book earlier today. I am working my way through it trying to process the best implementation in my context. I am looking forward to your upcoming project that uses the session as a centerpiece.
Great! Let me know what you think!
Thank you.
This is a necessary workflow for me. I use a similar system, but have trouble getting the details to work – such as how to make the daily folders recur appropriately, how to link them to the task lists, and how to arrange the task lists to highlight those items that MUST be done daily, or every weekday.
Do you have any references in your books that you can point to for help? I have both books.
Hmm, it may depend on the specifics of the tasks. You might benefit from distinguishing templates and checklists. Templates are useful to recreate instances of tasks that have changing parts, e.g. you could have a template of a project that would be duplicated for each client you have. A checklist could be more useful for just being repeated over and over like a winding down the day.
Maybe Chapters 17 and 18 (pp472-631) in Creating Flow?
Thank you, will have a look.
Kourosh’s work is definitely recommended reading and has been invaluable to myself and the community. I would start there.
As a supplement I think this concept of sessions lends itself more to Sprints in Scrum than GTD.
This is a great introduction to Scrum…
http://amzn.to/1Uyw3Fl
Its more geared towards teams but definitely has applications to individuals. Im intrigued with combining the aspects of GTD and Scrum/Agile into a more workable solution. I would love to see some better support for sprints in OF as well/
Hi Jason,
Scrum sounds interesting. I’ve heard of it before, but have only heard of it in context of teams. I’ll take a look. Thanks for the reference!
This concept of Sessions is really interesting.
I’ve been using the Agile GTD concept of planning the day by outcomes, which I’m finding works great with ‘known’ work (that I’ve done before / am familiar with, so can accurately predict how much time tasks will take, and what the specific tasks are) — and not so well with new-to-me work.
With new-to-me work, it’s very frequent that I do productive work that produces completely different outcomes than I expected — so I’m not getting the wins of checking off the planned outcomes.
Sessions works better with this new work, for me.
That’s exactly the issue with unknown work. It’s not clear how long it will take, as we don’t know what it will look like in the end, nor the steps there. We discover it as it is made. Having a a way to travel there by way of regular sessions allows for both flexibility and structure.
Thanks for this — made for quite an awesome “eureka” moment for me as my “Hotlist” perspective was starting to get cluttered to the point where I felt like I was losing focus on things. I’d either put too much in there and ignore the medium-priority things, or I’d have really low-priority things that I’d see in every weekly review that never quite got “promoted” onto the Hotlist.
Using this approach, combined with the “Considered Task” has greatly improved my focus and my flow, and I’ve actually taken it a step further by baking up an Applescript that lets me assign a keyboard shortcut to easily jump to perspectives, links, and apps specified in the Notes field. This way I can click on a task like “Consider: Household Projects”, hit “CMD+G” (my chosen shortcut via FastScripts) and be taken right to that perspective. I don’t normally leave my notes fields exposed in most views, and having a keyboard shortcut to jump around just feels like it gives me a more natural “flow” between different areas.
As an added bonus, this method can be used with any other type of URI, so it’s a great way to open web pages, send emails, or make telephone calls directly from a task, and I added a little bit of extra code to allow me to specify links to other OS X apps.
For anybody else who may be interested, I decided to polish up the script with some comments and posted it here: http://jesse.hollington.ca/2016/05/getting-focused-with-omnifocus.html
Looks great, Jesse! You’ve nailed the grouping idea. And I totally love the script. I just connected it to a shortcut via Keyboard Maestro.
I’m preparing a separate post for this …
Thanks Kourosh — glad you found it helpful. I find it amazing sometimes how the simplest little improvements to “flow” can make such a big difference 🙂
Thanks very much for this. I’m very intrigued by this refinement of the Dashboard, as I have had much the same experience to which you alluded (feeling harried, Dashboard overwhelmed, etc).
I understand you are planning to write a detailed post in the future, but perhaps you can answer a couple basic organizational questions:
Do your Dashboard tasks live in a dedicated “Dashboard” or other “Meta” project?
Are these the only “tasks” with due dates? In other words, do individual sub-tasks and/or projects not have due dates? If so, how do you deal with hard due dates?
Thanks for any further guidance!
The Dashboard tasks are a compilation of:
Each links to their own set of tasks/perspective/project/…
None of them have due dates. Or they rarely do, I should say. I’ll usually add a hard due date to a single task in a project. But, because of the habits I’ve developed — such as starting on a project early, and working on it regularly, as well as having an improving idea of what I can and cannot take on, — I rarely run into due dates at all.
Ah – got it. Thanks for expanding on that, it helps a lot. As does this post. Much appreciated!
Read the entire Creating Flow book (God, it’s a long book :)). Learned a lot. Adopted many of the author’s suggestions, ending up with this:
STRUCTURE
Navigation folder- holds repeating tasks, major routines, minor routines, and launch tasks for engaged projects and lists.
Today perspective – holds launch tasks linked (CMD+Space shortcut) to Support Lists and Flow Lists, sandwiched by primary and secondary routines.
Support Lists – hold items that are non-critical in nature and can be worked on when there is time and energy (errands, reading list, shopping, gift ideas…)
Flow Lists – short, completable lists that can/must be cleared. Think support lists that are more critical in nature.(communications, agendas, home and office quick tasks, considerations, finances…)
Throwaway Perspectives – abstract out constellation of projects.
Note: Heavy use of double-dispatch launch tasks. These tasks have a link to a constellation/folder of projects. The whole system is designed to hide and abstract out complexity via layers. So from Today’s perspective I can select a launch task and CMD+Space into a project Flow List (single action list). From there I can select another sub-launch-task and CMD+Space into a specific sub-project…
FLOW
Settle the system (clear inbox & mind). Dr. Dini talks about this at length in his book – Creating Flow in Omnifocus.
Process Flow Lists + Support Lists top to bottom.
Work on 1-3 selected Projects or Major Routines from selected from Navigation. The number of selected projects depends on schedule and time constraints (part of settling and task selection). The engaged project launch tasks are set at various repeating intervals. So I may decide to work on some daily on others 1-2 times per week.
Process secondary routines (wind down your day).
Journal lessons learned, things to improve, etc.
Rinse and repeat.
Creating Flow is THE best Omnifocus book I’ve read so far or most likely, ever will. The amount of thought that was put into writing this book is astounding. Looking forward to reading his 2 other books.