[wilsonng]

Collecting and organizing projects are fun and all but you'll be learning to do the Weekly Review soon.

The initial GTD euphoria occurs when you've captured everything that you have into OmniFocus during the capture phase. All those tasks get organized and placed into projects and single-task lists.

But you'll always be in capture mode and adding more tasks and projects to an ever-growing OmniFocus list.

During the weekly review, you'll have to set time aside to determine what projects you really want to work on for the next week. Flag those and focus on those tasks first.

Learn to be a vicious editor during the Weekly review. Take a realistic look at all of your projects and determine what can really be done this week and what can wait until the next weekly review. Set all the other projects to "On Hold" status. If you want, you can also move those "on hold" projects to a Someday/Maybe folder. The only projects that should have an "active" status should be the ones you are willing to work on this week. Be realistic about your capabilities.

I have a lot of projects that i want to work on but I know I can focus on my Three Big Rocks of the week. Google the internet for "Three Big Rocks". I believe it is mentioned by Stephen Covey of the 7 Habits fame.

But you should also start dropping projects that sounded cool when you first captured them but you have decided they are no longer relevant or will just take too much of your time/energy to accomplish.

Once a month, I'll do a project purge. There will be some projects that will have been in OmniFocus for a long time. I have to look to see if i need to reword the Next Actions to see if they align with my goals. Sometimes just rewording the Next Actions will help provide better clarity about why I am keeping this project in OmniFocus.

If a project no longer aligns with my goals then I would just drop or delete it. It no longer becomes relevant.

There will be times when the light bulb in my head lights up and I'll have a totally brilliant idea. I capture it to OmniFocus and I flesh out the project. But after a week or more, I look at that great idea and suddenly realize that this is way more than I can handle. I sometimes need to offload this project and delegate to someone else who has the better skill set and time for it.

Other times, I'll look at a project and think to myself "what was I thinking?" It may have sounded good at the time. But upon closer examination, it does not align with my higher horizons of focus or goals in my life. Maybe I was a volunteer for a charitable event for a long time. But as time goes on, I discover that my heart is no longer into the charitable event or cause because I have been ignoring something else in my life. So I know I'll have to quit one project to take on another project. If I try to juggle the previous commitment and the next commitment, I'll most likely fail because I have too much to work on.

OmniFocus' review perspective is a great tool to use. You can set review interval dates for each project. The default setting is to review every week. But some projects don't need to be reviewed weekly. Some can be set for 1 month, 3 months, or even longer.

When you highlight a project, you can click on the "Marked as Reviewed" button on your toolbar if you have it showing, hit Command-Shift-R or select "Mark Reviewed" in the Edit menu. This will set the next review date for the selected project.


Google the internet for articles on Weekly Review. The Weekly Review is when I put on my editor's hat and start trimming the fat and leaving the good stuff on the plate.