Omnifocus and time planing
 

Hello,

I am using Omnifocus for all my projects (personal or professional) and my calendar for appointments or anything which has to be done on a specific moment (pay the rent, go to a movie, ...).

Here is how I proceed. For instance, I have four appointments to do this week which will all take around two hours, some documentation to write which will take around 8 hours to complete.

I will create four projects for the appointments and assign the relevant tasks in them, assign the duration, and then add them to my calendar. Same procedure for the documentation except I will not add it to my calendar but instead assign a due date.

Each morning I do a quick review about what I should do during the day (which ends up always by saying every 2 second, "ah true, I need to do that!"). I then proceed over each tasks. If I didn't have time to finish them all, it's not a problem, I will do it the next day. If I finish early, I will add some new tasks for the day.
Each week, I make a bigger review and to track if I am running late on a specific project and to prioritize.

This have been working quite well for the last past 8 months but I am still having trouble to plan available time.

How to know how much free time you will have so you can assign appointments, client projects, ...
At the moment, it do it by allocating a specific time frame for projects. For instance, the 3rd to the 8th will be for a specific client, the 14th and 15th for another, the 17th, ... All this goes to my calendar.

It mostly work but I have the feeling I can improve this part :-)

I'm not sure I have the perfect answer to this question, but my sense is that the weekly review needs to include an assessment of "how much is too much." That is, GTD makes it possible to get pretty ambitious about how much we can handle, how many balls we can juggle at one time, how many different things we can fit into our day. But we shouldn't get carried away, and allow ourselves to take on more than is mentally or physically healthy. So the weekly review -- or at the minimum the monthly review -- should include the question, "how did this last week feel?" and "how do I want the next week to feel?" Did I include enough "down time," "me time," "family time" (or whatever) in the week? Can I do less and still fulfill all my real obligations? I suspect most of us need to come up for air at least once a day, and allocate more free, unassigned time into our weeks ... for the unexpected, for a nap, for a walk around the block to clear the head.