[devn]

Originally Posted by curt.clifton

devn,

Thanks for your thoughtful post. Lots of interesting ideas there.

I think you actually are asking for a little automated life coach. And I think that's a wonderful idea! Making GTD really work is all about developing a set of habits. An application that would help with that would be great.

Given the power of OmniFocus, somebody should write a book on "Getting Things Done with OmniFocus". I'm imagining a description of best practices, along with modifications that you might want to make for your own circumstances (for example, if all your work is computer based you might not have many different contexts). The end of each chapter could have a checklist that you could review periodically to see where you need to improve your habits. Then a companion application, like you suggested, could mine your OF data and provide you with coaching. The challenge would be keeping the application from nagging you about things when you consciously choose to do it your own way. That's an interesting problem.

Yay! I didn't come off as a lazy jerk with a bunch of feature requests!

I think you nailed exactly what I was talking about. We need some way to drill down into this gigantic wealth of information we're inputting into our system, and make it smart. It's a touchy subject because "smart" can mean so many things, but there has to be a few elegant tools that OmniGroup could build into OmniFocus that wouldn't detract from the idea behind the application, while still providing users with something to help them on their quest to GTD mastery. I've actually been thinking about writing that book myself. I don't know if I could get it published, but the blog traffic might be worth it. Anyway, thanks for your comments. Let's keep this discussion friendly and open and try to get /something/ in the words, even if that means parsing exported comma separated OmniFocus databases. I started writing a little application last night, but it's going to be a lonnngggg time coming, so beware.

Also, Curt: I'm not sure if you missed the way I was explaining it or if you were just discussing, in general, the interesting problem of nag vs. the will of the user, but just for clarification: It seems to me keeping the "Life Coach" confined to a sort of "scriptable project", if you will, would achieve the goal in question. I mean, after all, if it's only a project, then a user can most certainly just check it off or delete the task if they don't want to do it or they think it's a bad suggestion. Perhaps bad suggestions could be controlled by doing something similar to a spam filter.

1. You fire up OmniFocus for the first time and you input all of your information, and turn on the GTD preference pane.
2. Over the next few days it starts learning about tasks you avoid, tasks you keep re-evaluating, projects you keep avoiding, and begins sending you some helpful reminders, ideas, etc. based on this to a project called, I don't know "Personal Assistant".
3. You don't like some of the reminders, so you just delete them. It sees you doing this, and remembers you deleted its suggestion for that project, task, etc.
4. You like some of the reminders and you follow them: You click "complete." to show OmniFocus it was helpful. OmniFocus is watching you. ;)
5. Now, reminders and ideas you didn't like are still put into that "Personal Assistant" project, but they are marked automatically as completed, so if you'd like to see what you've been missing, you just change the view to "All", instead of Remaining, Next Actions, etc.
6. You see a good reminder that you think you would like to receive, so you uncheck the complete box, and boom, rule removed.

Note that this is just an example of implementation, but I'd love to hear some different views on this. How would everyone go about implementing a personal assistant in OmniFocus?

All the best,
Devin