"The main point of OmniFocus is to hide things from you".

[Brian]

A tweet (http://twitter.com/gtdtimes/statuses/13136946908) from the GTDTimes folks caused me to re-stumble across a great bit of writing that I hadn't read in a while. Linking it here so I don't lose track of it again, and because I think it could spark some great discussion.

How to Wrap Your Head Around the Finest (and Most Perplexing) GTD App on the Market (http://norbauer.com/notebooks/ideas/notes/the-psychology-of-omnifocus)

I feel like this article neatly captures the places where OmniFocus currently succeeds (being a trusted system, helping you hide things that aren't relevant, very powerful once you learn to use it), and the places where we need to do a better job. (The steep learning curve. Complexity. New folks don't enjoy all the setup required before they see the benefits and often fear missing actions they can't see.)

What do you guys think?

[SpiralOcean]

Excellent article! Yes, yes and yes.

However, I disagree with the 'complexity' of setting it up. It could just be me, and I understand there is a wide swath of experience out there. But OmniFocus is relatively simple compared to applications like Photoshop.

[SpiralOcean]

Photoshop may be a bit exclusive, although there are plenty of users who use it. But even compared to iPhoto, MS Word, Excel, Numbers, Pages... all of those apps are much more wide open and in my opinion more complex for users. Even for a user to set up Mac mail is more complex than setting up OmniFocus.

The trick for most users is to 'get it'. Changing their view of what a task list is. Especially with outlining, creating children, and what that means.

I find the easiest way to explain how to use outlining is...
If you can't complete an action, what steps would it take to move that action forward toward completion. Create these as children. Then when you get to the first child action, ask the same question, if you can't complete it, what steps would it take to move that action toward completion. Those are children of that action.

If a user does this enough, at some point they will hit the actionable items that are doable.

[Tekneek]

OmniFocus was extremely easy for me. In fact, it is the GTD app that I had wished for and had somehow not come upon yet. It may be more complex for people who are not comfortable with GTD, but I can't seem to put that genie back into the bottle in order to see things from their perspective.

[malisa]

I came back here looking for inspiration. This article is just what I needed. Thanks.

The main point of OmniFocus is to hide things from you that you can’t possibly be doing right now while still letting you track them. This way you don’t have to freak out when you’re looking for a menu of things to do when you roll out of bed in the morning and a million stimuli are bombarding you all screaming for immediate attention. If you don’t use OmniFocus with this end always in mind, you’re missing most of what’s useful about it. Otherwise, OmniFocus is just a weird-looking and pointlessly complicated list-maker.

I usually work on whatever the smallest Macbook available is (upgraded in December from a 12" whatever it was to the small MacBook Pro) and often in OF I feel like I just. need. a bigger. window. I have an big external monitor that I can go use, and I will when I get that feeling. I think now, I realize that that's just an indication that I need to refine my perspectives and look at less.

[zoisite]

The main point of OmniFocus is to hide things from you.

... at the risk of some actions may falling through the cracks.

It's not a bug, It's a feature! Creative advertisement strategy :)

No offense. As I explained in detail in another thread here, OmniFocus' lack of tags/multiple contexts worries me that I could miss some important actions because I can assign only one context to each of them which leads to not seeing them in other related contexts. The intimidating multitude of options doesn't help either.

Before reading the article I hoped that it would explain how to get around this problem. But it only discusses the basic mechanics that I already knew.

I think we will all agree on this: a major purpose of a task management app is to narrow down the long list of all of your tasks to a reasonably smaller list that contains only the tasks you need/want to do now. That's what is meant by "it hides things from you", show the important ones and hide the unimportant (important is defined by what you need/want/like to do now according to your current situation).

A rule of thumb: A task management app should show as little as possible and as much as necessary to help the user focus on just the important stuff.

Like OmniFocus, Things does also allow you to hide unimportant stuff and it does so by a tagging system that does this job imho much better (tags allow you to look at the same task from different points of view => tasks are less likely to slip through, because many "eyes" look at them).

Congratulations, so what? "Hiding unimportant stuff" is not an exclusive OmniFocus feature like this thread would like to suggest. As if this would be something special. Its just an elementary feature that every task management application has to have.

I see a danger (at least for the unexperienced user) that actions get buried deep inside project hierarchies — like: "forget to flag a task and it is lost". Being able to nest sub-projects into projects (and sub-sub-projects into sub-projects and...) is a great organizational feature, but it is also dangerous that they become graves in that tasks get buried.

As I said many times OmniFocus is incredibly powerful (much more than Things), but not used right it can lead to disaster. That is the main advantage of Things: It is designed so simple and self-explanatory that it is virtually impossible for you to miss a task (one would have to try really really hard to do so or be really dumb). If you will, Things is foolproof - OmniFocus is not (because it is more sophisticated).

+1 for tags in OmniFocus. They would help a lot to make it foolproof, so that it is less likely for a task to "fall through the cracks".

I may have been a bit harsh, but I wanted to express some critical thoughts against the general hooray tone in this thread. Just to add a little constructive criticism to the party.

Well, in an ironic and twisted way the quote is quite right.
"Indeed, OmniFocus does hide things from you..."

[CatOne]

Yeah, but that's what reviews are for. You need to do reviews, on a regular basis.

Things can hide tasks, but again if you bury everything in "Someday" and never check it, they'll be lost as well. Having 400 tasks in your Next list and having to filter them using tags every time you want to get a subset is not optimal. Or at least, it's not for me, because you have to re-filter every time you do something, as the views aren't "sticky" and can't be defined by perspectives.

There are good and bad points to both products. I'd really like to be able to work in project mode 100% of the time in OF without regard at all to contexts, but that's not really workable at present.

[SpiralOcean]

One thing not mentioned in this thread is the ease of getting things into OmniFocus. I love the searching while I type and the ease for creating new projects and contexts. Not to mention tabbing around to different fields. For me, that is up top on the list. I shy away from applications that make me use a mouse for tasks that are better suited for a keyboard.

[Greg Jones]

As I said many times OmniFocus is incredibly powerful (much more than Things), but not used right it can lead to disaster. That is the main advantage of Things: It is designed so simple and self-explanatory that it is virtually impossible for you to miss a task (one would have to try really really hard to do so or be really dumb). If you will, Things is foolproof - OmniFocus is not (because it is more sophisticated).

I have a license for Things Mac and Things Touch and for a long time I used both in parallel. Not because I needed to use two task managers-doing so is the ultimate 'not low-drag, not GTD' solution. I like 'playing' with task managers, but I also expect the tool to work for me.

There is a lot to like in Things for the Mac but Things Touch-not so much. Think it's virtually impossible to miss a task in Things? If so, then create several repeating tasks with scheduled start dates in Things Mac and then go on the road for a few days with nothing but an iPhone as I did about a month ago. None of the scheduled tasks appear on Things Touch unless they are synced daily to Things Mac, and syncing is not possible OTA. I would have been totally screwed had I not also had the same tasks scheduled in OmniFocus.

Since then, for the first time since Things was launched, OmniFocus is the only task manager on my Mac and on my iPhone. I have no one to blame but myself if I miss a task in OnmiFocus-can't say the same for Things.

[wilsonng]

Yeah, but that's what reviews are for. You need to do reviews, on a regular basis.

Things can hide tasks, but again if you bury everything in "Someday" and never check it, they'll be lost as well. Having 400 tasks in your Next list and having to filter them using tags every time you want to get a subset is not optimal. Or at least, it's not for me, because you have to re-filter every time you do something, as the views aren't "sticky" and can't be defined by perspectives.

There are good and bad points to both products. I'd really like to be able to work in project mode 100% of the time in OF without regard at all to contexts, but that's not really workable at present.


I agree with CatOne. When you have too many tasks/projects and you need tags to filter your tasks/projects, then you need to do some housecleaning with the weekly review. There are a lot of people who forget about the weekly review or never bothered implementing the weekly review. Once I got the weekly review habit going, everything clicked in OmniFocus for me. The weekly review is the special sauce that makes GTD work.

If you don't review your projects/tasks, then you aren't seriously looking at your ever increasing workload and deciding what needs to be placed back on the backburner (set status to On Hold or Someday/Maybe), what needs to be activated again (change On Hold status to Active and out of Someday/Maybe), and what needs to be deleted (projects that are no longer relevant.

If you do't do the weekly review, you can no longer "trust" what is in your system. You'll have items still left inside that are no longer needed and just adds up to the junk. Our daily activities and bright ideas will keep adding more projects/tasks to the ever increasing backlog of stuff that interests you or things that you want to do. But sometimes you have to clear out those ideas. What you thought once upon a time was a brilliant idea no longer seems that great when you look deeper into it. It's time to just delete the project. There are projects that you'll get to eventually. It's time to put it on hold for you to review next time.

Like your house, you have to throw out old newspapers that don't mean much, toss out magazines with outdated articles, toss out or throw away old clothes that no longer fits, throw out outdated food from the fridge, etc.

If you can't do housecleaning in your projects/tasks, then you're not gonna look at your task list anymore because you don't trust it. The status of your projects are not updated and it's always in the back of your mind to do something about it.

Housecleaning (the weekly review) is the most important habit you can make. It will make tags not as important.

If you want to focus in on a context or just a project, then OmniFocus' perspectives is the tool. When I first started using OmniFocus, I didn't really get perspectives. But once I saw the screencast for perspectives, OmniFocus became so much easier. I have custom perspectives to zoom in on either a project or context for my most used views. I think using tags to zoom in on your tasks is an OK method but not quite optimal for me. If you can get a handle on perspectives then you'll find that stuff doesn't fall through the cracks. The only reason something falls through the cracks for me is when I neglect to do the weekly review or look through my different perspectives during my daily review.....

[SpiralOcean]

If you do't do the weekly review, you can no longer "trust" what is in your system. You'll have items still left inside that are no longer needed and just adds up to the junk. Our daily activities and bright ideas will keep adding more projects/tasks to the ever increasing backlog of stuff that interests you or things that you want to do. But sometimes you have to clear out those ideas. What you thought once upon a time was a brilliant idea no longer seems that great when you look deeper into it. It's time to just delete the project. There are projects that you'll get to eventually. It's time to put it on hold for you to review next time.

Nice reminder wilsonng. I do the weekly review, but am now wondering if I need to start archiving some of those projects. Trying to find that edge of: projects that don't seem as interesting to me and giving it up by deleting it is something I'm looking at.

Any suggestions for determining if something should be deleted? I suppose dropping a project is another option. That way it will move over to the archive when I archive items, and it's still there in the archive if I go back and search for it.

A book I read about clearing clutter (Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui) has helped me with clearing physical clutter. One tip in the book to get rid of books is; donate the books to the library. The book is at the library if you want to go back and read it. (I've never gone back to the library to get a book).

I'm starting to realize clearing out the mental clutter of someday/maybe is something I may want to look at. I've changed many of the someday/maybe reviews to every 3 months, 6 months or even 1 year. This has cut down on the number of items to review in someday/maybe on a weekly basis.

[Brian]

[I]I see a danger (at least for the unexperienced user) that actions get buried deep inside project hierarchies — like: "forget to flag a task and it is lost". Being able to nest sub-projects into projects (and sub-sub-projects into sub-projects and...) is a great organizational feature, but it is also dangerous that they become graves in that tasks get buried.

As I said many times OmniFocus is incredibly powerful (much more than Things), but not used right it can lead to disaster. That is the main advantage of Things: It is designed so simple and self-explanatory that it is virtually impossible for you to miss a task (one would have to try really really hard to do so or be really dumb).

Zoisite, I think you've hit on one of the features of OmniFocus that does scare a lot of potential customers: that they'll get something buried in their database and blow a deadline.

Not missing your items means needing to understand contexts, and perspectives, and how the view filters work, and the difference between Project mode and Context mode... It's a lot of stuff you need to know about. When folks sit down with an app that's supposed to make them more productive, they often feel like they're getting less done because of all the stuff they need to learn about. They don't enjoy that feeling.

By comparison, a tagging system feels a lot better - you can add multiple tags to an item, and be more sure that when you go looking for it, you'll find it. It's also pretty easy to make a new tag that you think you need and add it to your system at any given time.

The reality is that neither approach is perfect. The downside of a system where stuff shows up on multiple lists is that those lists get fuzzier; you'll probably have to spend more time thinking about the stuff on that sublist when you're deciding what to do next.

In OmniFocus, my "Phone" context shows me the tasks that I can only accomplish on the phone. If I'm checking actions off from the phone list, it's because there's no other way I could get that action done.

If I had an action in my database that was tagged "@bob @phone @email", my Phone list would be showing me a list of things I could possibly get done on the phone. There's more stuff to think about on that second list; while the phone may be one way to do that action, it may not be the best way.

A lot of current OmniFocus customers want their lists to show that - the best way. The want to plan their system out, and then let the system do the work.

What I particularly liked about that article was how it illustrated both the power of the current approach and how unfriendly that system can be to folks. We're looking at ways to make the app both more powerful and more friendly: making it more flexible in the manner you're asking for is one of the ways we could do that. But we need to make smart choices about how we do that. :-)

[wilsonng]

Any suggestions for determining if something should be deleted? I suppose dropping a project is another option. That way it will move over to the archive when I archive items, and it's still there in the archive if I go back and search for it.

A book I read about clearing clutter (Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui) has helped me with clearing physical clutter. One tip in the book to get rid of books is; donate the books to the library. The book is at the library if you want to go back and read it. (I've never gone back to the library to get a book).

I'm starting to realize clearing out the mental clutter of someday/maybe is something I may want to look at. I've changed many of the someday/maybe reviews to every 3 months, 6 months or even 1 year. This has cut down on the number of items to review in someday/maybe on a weekly basis.

I've slowly evolved my own GTD setup and found that it's easier for me to keep my Crazy Ideas clutter outside of OmniFocus.

I use OmniOutliner and created an outline called "Crazy Ideas". This is where I go crazy and enter any crazy idea that pops into my head. I put crazy ideas into OmniOutliner instead of OmniFocus because I'm not ready to commit to it to as an OmniFocus project. There's no need to clutter up OmniFocus with all these half-baked ideas that I haven't committed to yet. If it's not in OmniFocus then it's out of sight, out of mind. I'll Google the web for web articles, movies, notes, and anything of interest that I've collected in my research in fleshing out a project. When I'm finally ready, I'll make a project and flesh out the next actions.

Sometimes I'm not quite ready for the Crazy Idea and I'll leave it in OmniOutliner to revisit during a weekly review.

I've seen some OmniFocus next actions list with every project set to "active" status. Some folks fear that some projects will fall through the cracks because they can't "see" everything. But I'd go insane if I had to wade through all the active projects and their next actions.

I subscribed to the Zen-To-Done/Covey idea of three big rocks per week. I set all my projects to "on hold" status. The projects are still there but they are not urgent.

Then I switch to Projects/Planning mode to see all of my projects. Based on my schedule and how I feel, I'll select anywhere from three to five project (sometimes seven if I'm feeling gutsy) and set those to "active" mode. These are the big rocks that I want to do for the coming week. My next actions list will show only the next actions that I want done. This reduces my next action list to something more manageable.

So my plate is basically full for the week because I have these three to five active projects and their next actions. I make sure to leave room because life will constantly throw new next actions at me anyways.

I do have an urgent perspective that shows me all the flagged items that I really want done.

Only you can know what projects should be deleted or dropped. If a project doesn't align with your goals at the higher Horizons of Focus, or is no longer interesting to you (what was I thinking when I created this project?), or if it is no longer relevant, just delete it. If you get inspired once again, that project you deleted will come back to you in a wave of inspiration. Then you can always add it back to OmniFocus. If you want a record, then you can set the status to dropped anyways.

During my quarterly review (every 3 months), I'll look back through my daily journals and completed/dropped projects and see if anything in there inspires me to create new projects.

That weekly review is awesome. If you don't do the weekly review, you'll always be worried that something fell through the cracks. My quarterly reviews usually go up to the higher Horizons of Focus to re-align my goals and purge out outdated projects that were just dumb ideas (but pretty awesome when I first thought about it!). Any projects that don't align themselves to my values and goals, I'd say "life is too short to waste time on things that I don't care for anymore."

To cut down the time for weekly review, I make have use of the next review date. Some projects should be reviewed once a week (the default setting). Other projects only have to be reviewed once a month.

I have the "review" perspective with all projects sorted by review date. I believe it is one of the default perspectives built into OmniFocus. So I only look at projects that need to be reviewed (due for a weekly review) or needs to be reviewed within the next week or month. That has helped shorten my weekly review.

My quarterly review is when i want to do more intensive re-alignment of projects to my goals.

If you don't do the housecleaning/weekly review/quarterly review, you'll find that you'll have so much junk and clutter that no longer means anything to you. I hate doing the housework but I know it's essential to my sanity. It's amazing that people forget to do housecleaning with their OmniFocus (or Things) projects and tasks.

Become your own self editor and ruthlessly hack away at all your Someday/Maybe list. Heck, move it out of OmniFocus and put into OmniOutliner. That way, you won't be cluttering OmniFocus anymore. I still have some half baked ideas in my "Crazy Ideas" outline. I'll go in and just toss out stuff that no longer means anything to me.

[SpiralOcean]

Thanks for the detailed workflow description wilsonng. I'm thinking about trying to set all my projects to on hold, except for one project. (This doesn't include the mundane tasks like housecleaning, processing OmniFocus, weekly review and such. Those are all grouped into a folder called maintenance for me.) If I run out of actions for that project, either because it's completed or I have -waiting for- actions, then I'll go into my someday/maybe and activate another project?

Maybe one way to accomplish this is during the weekly review. Set all projects including new ones to on hold.

Another thing I may try is to flag one project a week. That may be easier. Then in my daily processing I can view the flagged filter and try to complete that one.

[wilsonng]

Yes, I also keep my office maintenance, home maintenance, and personal maintenance projects active. All the other projects are on hold except for my "big rocks". All my new projects are automatically set to on hold. If it was truly urgent, I would have already started on it! And sometimes what other people think is urgent is not an urgent priority to you. We have to remember to truly determine if new projects align with our own goals.

Bang away with your weekly review and self-editing. Be harsh and critical with your projects and see what can be dropped and/or deleted. You'll feel much better!

When I do run out of active projects or get stuck, I will often look at Someday/Maybe to see if there is something in there that can be activated.

As always, my GTD setup is a work in progress. But that's the beauty of OmniFocus. It can grow with you.

[Mango Himself]

Good comments.

One thing I do quite differently than Allen is that I perform a 'daily review'. I like to feel in control.

It took me a long time to realize one very basic difference between OF and Things: Things works better for the individual who likes to tackle one project at a time and stick to it until completed. OF allows you to perform actions for several projects almost simultaneously. I love the context feature in NEXT where as soon as you check one action the next one in the same project takes over. It has proven invaluable to me since I run several customer's projects at the same time. If I were to implement Things I would make the other wait until I finish the one I'm working on currently.

[wilsonng]

Yes, I do my daily review in the morning so that I remind myself of what needs to be done today or what next actions are available for me. Then I look at my calendar to see any events for the day. Then I like inside the tickler file to see if there was something important for me to refer to for today.

At the end of the day, I do another daily review, enter notes into my daily journal, and look ahead for the next 3 days.

I do my weekly review to go up one horizon horizon to review my projects and someday/maybe.

I'll do the quarterly review and go to the higher horizons of focus for goals and double check to make sure my current projects are properly aligned with my goals.

So each review (daily, weekly, quarterly) will go higher. One of these days, I'll actually be able to go up to the higher horizons of focus such as vision and purpose. But for now, I'm content with trying to master the lower horizons of focus before I start to get comfortable with the higher horizons of focus.


@Mango Himself:

Thanks for differentiating Things and OmniFocus. That's a great observation about handling multiple projects and single-focus projects.

I hadn't spent enough time with Things to notice it. Things just couldn't grow with me. I couldn't have projects with parallel tasks or sequential tasks. Not sure if Things has updated itself to handle sequential projects or parallel projects.

[Mango Himself]

@wilsonng

thanks. Actually Things has not come up with many changes lately. They do feature a Search function on desktop and iPhone that actually is far superior to OF. I wish OF had some of the Things features starting with the interface. Unfortunately, Things lacks way more than OF. I really like Things but OF does a much better job.

I would probably say that Things is a Task Manager and OF is a Project Manager. Sort of reminds me of the difference between Palm's Bonsai by Natara and Shadowplan by CodeJedi.