[Jay]

I'm an incredibly slow learner and old habits die hard. I've bounced back and forth between OmniFocus and another tool since the OF version 1.0 days. I liked the flexibility of OF but never started mastering it until recently. Why? Due dates. I would set due dates for every task and it wasn't long before I felt overwhelmed and would just grind to a halt. After hearing David Sparks and others recommend using due dates sparingly a light went on for me and I thought "why didn't *I* think of that?"

I will say that it's an iterative process and the more I read and listen to the way others use OF the more changes I make. I use flags to denote stuff I'd like to do today as I still don't have a great feel for how much I can knock out in a day. If something sits flagged for too long I remove the flag to get it out of my sight. The software has an elegant simplicity, really, once you get into a groove. The flip side of that elegance is the number of options available to fit your workflow. My mistake for too long was to try to use all of them and thus sucking wind badly in a very short time.

One other thing I've learned with OF is that if I find myself feeling "friction" that I'm being too detailed or have things spread all over the place I just take an hour and "clean house" reorganising my project list and folders until things seem orderly again. Again, for me, it's iterative without being "fiddly". Would I like to see multiple contexts? Yes since I view tasks more than one way and don't want my context list to become unwieldy. For example, assigning my customer's name and phone as contexts would let me filter all tasks for that customer or all phone calls. That is probably not canonical GTD but it is the way my mind works (or doesn't). And yes, I could group all projects regardless of context into a folder for that customer...perhaps a poor example.

Of course, just as I finally begin to tread water with OF the new version will be available and I get to do it all over again. :-)