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Like your house, you have to throw out old newspapers that don't mean much, toss out magazines with outdated articles, toss out or throw away old clothes that no longer fits, throw out outdated food from the fridge, etc.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