[Jables]

Hey all,

So this year I've decided to get my act together and get organized to I can really start getting things done. A friend of mine suggest I check out GTD and Omnifocus to help me along the way. I recently finished reading GTD and many of the concepts presented made a lot of sense to me and I was thrilled to see that Omnifocus is completely built around the GTD system. Today I spent some time doing my first inbox mindsweep and processing everything into different projects.

It was a little daunting and intimidating at first but I finally finished it. I'm in the process of just giving everything I've processed a quick once over and I have a few comments and concerns that are beginning to pop up. I know that at it's core, working with any system is all about making it work for you on a personal level and there's a good chance many of these questions will get worked out as I start to implement OF into my daily routine. Still, I figured it wouldn't hurt to ping some of the more experienced folks here in hopes of maybe getting some early tips or feedback that can help me avoid potential pitfalls along the way. Any help you guys and gals can provide is greatly appreciated.

Just a little background on myself and my approach to setting up OF, I'm a mobile game developer and I generally spend all of my free time sitting in front of a computer at work. I also heavily relied on the screencasts provided by the Mac Power Users in order to setup OF on my Mac.

Projects - One of my initial concerns is regarding my organization of projects and project folders in OF. I'm having a difficult time figuring what should be a folder and what should be the actual project. In my first pass of Organization, I noticed that I had a lot of folders with projects underneath them, that had the exact same name as the folder itself. While the organization of it all seemed decent, the project itself didn't seem like an actual project. I think one of the issues is that (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) OF doesn't allow you to place individual tasks under a folder in the project list. For example, I have a bunch of random tasks that I'd like to accomplish around the house. These tasks aren't really related in any certain way other than they're things that I need to get done outside of work. All don't together, they don't really serve any single project that needs to be done. However, if I'd like them to be organized in the folder hierarchy under the "Home" folder, I have to add them to some basic project, a "To Do" list of sorts. This seems to fly in the face of what GTD is all about. It seems like what constitutes a project in GTD isn't the same as in OF. OF really seems to want you to make everything into some sort of project for the sake of organization. Should I be using Miscellaneous more than I am? In short, I'm having a hard time effectively breaking down my tasks into appropriately organized projects in OF.

Contexts - As if the above wasn't throwing me for enough of a loop, Contexts also seem to have their own particular set of issues (as noted by various threads I've read through on this forum already). There seems to be a lot of crossover in several places. For example, the classic categorization is Home and Work. This seems simple enough, but where is starts to get tricky is when you throw in something like Mac or Computer. Well, I have a Computer at work and I have a Computer at home. The Computer context seems to bleed over into other contexts. This makes it a little difficult to determine what stuff really goes where.

I also created a context called "Personal Time" for all the things I'd like to get done whenever I have my own free time outside of my work and home responsibilities. However, this seems to encompass a pretty major list of items and sort of seems like a potential issue down the road if I have difficulty delegating my "personal time". Then there are other things like Exercising and Working Out. I have various fitness activities that I like to partake in, some involve classes and regular schedules while others are somewhat random activities that are done once in awhile. I created a context called "Working Out" but this doesn't seem very useful at the moment. Generally the act of working out is something that is determined beforehand, before the context is actually a thing or active. I'm just curious if there are any tips you all might have for contexts. I'm somewhat torn as to whether these are things that should focus what I do or just tell me when I'm actually can do something and leave the "whether or not" up to me.