[sriggs]

Recently, I have forced myself to apply the DA rule about what goes in my calendar and what goes in my lists and I thought I would share what I learned out of that applied to OmniFocus.

I found that I kept a lot of things that were due on a specific day in my lists. It made sense at the time. This software has due dates and times so it seems like the right thing to do.

Well, DA says that anything that has to happen on a specific day goes in your calendar so I decided to make a conscious effort to follow that rule.

Situation: We have an end of year Girl Scout ceremony to attend. There will be a dress rehearsal and we also need to make a costume for the little play that is part of the program. Also, we need to pick up salad to contribute to the dinner.

I schedule the ceremony and rehearsal in iCal. They are appointments and this is the obvious place to put them.

As I’m thinking of the event, I realize that I would like to get it on video. I schedule ‘Charge the video camera’ in iCal since this must happen on the day before the ceremony.

I schedule ‘Pick up 3 family salads from restaurant’ in iCal since this must happen just before we go to the ceremony.

As I’m thinking of the event, I realize that I need to bring Girl Scout dues with me. I schedule ‘Get 5 dollars cash from bank for Girl Scout dues’ in iCal since this must happen just before we go to the ceremony.

In OmniFocus, I create a project under my ‘Kids’ folder* called ‘Make costume for Girl Scout ceremony’. Since the costume needs to be ready for rehearsal, I give the project a due date of the day of the rehearsal. I give the project some actions and we are all set. We work on actions from the costume project as we have time and OmniFocus will warn us as the due date grows near.

In my old way of doing things, I would have created a ‘Girl Scout ceremony’ project and placed everything in there. My first fear was not having all the actions to complete ‘Girl Scout ceremony’ in one place. Well, I am now converted to using iCal for all ‘has to happen on this day’ actions. Everything went off without a hitch. Nothing was missed. When I look at my calendar, I know that I have those times spoken for and I can’t schedule other things during those times. Now I look at OmniFocus as a list manager and there is nothing date critical in there. Date critical things alert me from iCal.

* I generally use folders in OmniFocus to group projects by who I’m doing them for. For example, I have Personal, Wife, Kids, Work