[wilsonng]

Simplify your life...

During the capture phase, we capture everything that is on our minds or on our plate. A lot of your projects/tasks are agreements with yourself or others to do this or do that (such as your honey do list, *sigh*).

But now that you have everything captured into your system, it is time for you to edit your life. Be vicious. Be realistic. Hopefully you will have an outline of your life goals and/or your areas of responsibilities (your role as a spouse, parent, boss/supervisor, subordinate, your position in the community (volunteering)).

Then you must determine if your areas of responsibilities truly reflect what you have today. Sometimes a role (such as soccer coach or president of your Parent-Teacher Association or on the board of the Homeowners Association) was fun for the last five years but now you have other more pressing interests (example: becoming a divemaster). You have a limited amount of time every week or month. You may have to resign from one post so that you can take up another role.

You'll have to be realistic about your time and energy. We can do everything for everyone.

Simplify your life by streamlining your roles and responsibilities. A recent example for me was adding the role of becoming a father. Previously, I had time to hang out for happy hour with my friends and I could attend many parties without having to worry about any dependents. But when I had two kids, I knew I had to trim down the happy hour after work parties and assume the new role of father. I've had to reduce my role in the community and with my friends to spend time with my family.

During your weekly review, take a look at your various projects and determine which projects are still relevant or aligns with your life goals or areas of responsibilities. Projects that sounded cool when you brainstormed the first time suddenly seems like something that you really didn't want to put your heart into. So just delete it. Or put it in a text file or OmniOutliner document called "Pipe Dreams." Then you can always refer to your Pipe Dreams file and put it back into OmniFocus in the future.

Be honest with yourself and know that you don't have more than two hands. Put all of your projects on hold by setting status to "On Hold" in the inspector window. During your weekly review, activate a handful of projects (three to five) by setting the status to "Active." This list represents all the projects that you want to make progress on for the next seven days.

All the active projects will have Next Actions that will be shown in your Context view. All the "On Hold" projects can be seen in Project mode but will be hidden in Context mode.

One of the best things you can do is to start over from scratch. Select File> Backup Database and save your current projects/task to this backup database. Then just clear out all your contexts and projects. Start over from scratch and rebuild. You can open your backup database in a separate window and copy and paste to your new OmniFocus database. You'll be editing your life and figuring out what projects should remain and what can go.

Sometimes you'll have too many things going on and you've lost sight of your life goals (the things that really matter to you). You just have to start over with a new OmniFocus database.

Every week, you will always add new projects and tasks to your OmniFocus database. But every week, go do a weekly review. Look at your projects list and see what can be deleted.

This should help you weed out all those useless projects that are no longer relevant.