Please note – Posts here at Using OmniFocus will be held off or at least slowed down while I work on the next edition of Creating Flow with OmniFocus.

Creating Flow with OmniFocus 3 is in the works. I’m regularly visiting it, adding ideas, making updates, changes, and the like.

The productivity world has changed tremendously since the first edition. Contexts have morphed into tags. Perspectives have grown in power. And in general, our tools are increasingly pervasive throughout our lives.

Meanwhile, our minds are still the minds that have developed through millennia of primitive culture. The anxieties and worries we carry, the desire for the meaningful, all continue to both drive and thwart our definitions and pursuits of “success”.

Organizing to find success is no easy feat. Quite humanly, we return to our tools, seeking simplicity, seemingly from the same milieu which complicated our lives in the first place. As always, it’s not our tools; it is how we use them that matters. And the more powerful our tools are, the more caution and experience they demand, and the more rewarding they can be when understood.

I’m hoping to streamline this next edition. The second edition had reached over 100,000 words and a thousand pages, albeit with many pictures. Unfortunately, I believe this falsely pushed the idea that they needed to be read! Silly, I know. But I had thought “the more, the better”. That’s simply untrue.

If possible, I would like to mimic the Omni Group’s “progressive disclosure”. It’s an unfolding process. As you want or need something, it becomes more visible. Otherwise, it stays out of your way. Now, how well I’ll succeed at doing so, we’ll just see. For all I know, I’ll make an even larger edition, and I’ll just have to eat my hat.

I will say, I’m quite impressed with how the Omni Group has created an unfolding experience with the iOS version.

So, when is it coming out?

I’m waiting until after the Mac OS X release of OmniFocus 3. Not only do I need to wait for the screenshots, but I want some time to adapt and understand any changes of workflows. That just takes time. If I had to guess, I’d say to look toward the end of 2018.

How much will it cost?

I don’t know yet. But, as before, if you already own a previous edition, you’ll be eligible for a discount.

What do I do in the meantime?

I’ll be posting from time to time, so check out the blog.

Check out the resources page. David Sparks, Tim Stringer, Joe Buhlig, and others have created their own excellent works on OmniFocus. I’m willing to bet that at least one of them will have solid videos about OmniFocus 3 out soon, if not already.

May I, also, direct you to my other wares? Being Productive is a video course that provides 14 fundamental practices of productivity. They are presented one at a time as simple exercises to be developed at your own pace.

Workflow Mastery approaches productivity from the direction of theory, building an all encompassing view of what meaningful work is and how we can approach it.

The course and book work for any tool, be that OmniFocus, pen and paper, everything in between, as well as the environments we build around ourselves. Samples are available with a mailing list sign up.

They are also fantastic, excellent, and at least pretty darn good.

Finally, Getting Things Done is still quite excellent and relevant. Too often, I believe, the community seems to assume it is all about contexts. That suggestion is only a small part of the entirety of habits that David Allen has compiled. The centerpiece of GTD is still about defining and building a trusted system, however that works for you as an individual. I often benefit from a re-read of the book.