[rdbot]

Thanks for such a well written and thoughtful reply. I'm amazing at how generous people are in the forum to share their experiences, one main thing that makes OF the best app I've used. I can apply all that to my workflow for sure. Has another tangential question re: start dates, but thought I'd make a new thread, esp since the question has been addressed in other posts in some ways: http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...528#post121528

Thanks again all for your help!


R

[Jay]

I'm an incredibly slow learner and old habits die hard. I've bounced back and forth between OmniFocus and another tool since the OF version 1.0 days. I liked the flexibility of OF but never started mastering it until recently. Why? Due dates. I would set due dates for every task and it wasn't long before I felt overwhelmed and would just grind to a halt. After hearing David Sparks and others recommend using due dates sparingly a light went on for me and I thought "why didn't *I* think of that?"

I will say that it's an iterative process and the more I read and listen to the way others use OF the more changes I make. I use flags to denote stuff I'd like to do today as I still don't have a great feel for how much I can knock out in a day. If something sits flagged for too long I remove the flag to get it out of my sight. The software has an elegant simplicity, really, once you get into a groove. The flip side of that elegance is the number of options available to fit your workflow. My mistake for too long was to try to use all of them and thus sucking wind badly in a very short time.

One other thing I've learned with OF is that if I find myself feeling "friction" that I'm being too detailed or have things spread all over the place I just take an hour and "clean house" reorganising my project list and folders until things seem orderly again. Again, for me, it's iterative without being "fiddly". Would I like to see multiple contexts? Yes since I view tasks more than one way and don't want my context list to become unwieldy. For example, assigning my customer's name and phone as contexts would let me filter all tasks for that customer or all phone calls. That is probably not canonical GTD but it is the way my mind works (or doesn't). And yes, I could group all projects regardless of context into a folder for that customer...perhaps a poor example.

Of course, just as I finally begin to tread water with OF the new version will be available and I get to do it all over again. :-)

[rdbot]

that was really helpful... learning a lot! :)

[Derek Zinger]

Like Jay, I have also had a recent "aha" moment after several years of overusing due dates.

In my case, I'm a freelancer, and I need to be able to prioritize tasks into rough "Do today", "Do soon", "Do after that", Do someday" groups. My epiphany was realizing that what I needed were project folders for each of these. So in my projects list I now have:

CURRENT (Folder)
-Client
--Project 1
--Project 2
-Another client
--Project 1

SOON (Folder)
-Client
--Project 1
--Project 2
--Project 3
-Another client
--Project 1

LATER (Folder)
-Project 1
-Project 2

SOMEDAY (Folder on hold)
-Project 1
-Project 2


Now, every so often I review and promote items up the list, from LATER to SOON to CURRENT, and eventually it gets flagged to be done today.

That was half of the epiphany. The other half was finally dumping all the due dates (unless it is really, truly important that it be done by that day), in favor of viewing my flagged and CURRENT projects and tasks. This is just a list of things that are on my plate right now. I look through it all calmly, choose which one to do first, and off I go. Whereas before I worked off of a homemade calendar view sorted by due dates, now OF clears away all the crap that I don't need to worry about while I'm working.

This has been said time and time again, but it bears repeating: You want to use OF mainly to HIDE stuff from you. I have a couple of perspectives I check in the morning as I prepare for the day, and an end-of-day perspective that I use to assign tasks for tomorrow. But outside of this and a weekly review, I don't want to see any more than is absolutely necessary, and this is where OF really shines. It's really really good at showing you only what you want to see. I think, however, in order for it do do so, you have to figure out how to organize your projects into folders and contexts that work for your life/work. It may take a little trial and error to get there, but once you get it set up, the software does indeed take on a kind of zen beauty.

Not sure how well I've explained it, but that's my recent experience. Hope it can perhaps provide a tiny bit of help.

Regards
Derek

[Cypher]

I use a similar structure to you Derek with the following folders to contain all my individual projects

• Priority Projects
• Main Projects
• Held Projects
• Someday Maybe

My projects are pretty fluid day to day and many of them frequently move up and down my folders as I reschedule my workdays. The projects I plan to work on either today or tomorrow move into my Priority folder and they appear at the top of my lists. I try to keep this group to a minimum usually no more than four or five critical ones to make sure I keep them moving. This week / next week projects tend to be in Main and I usually have about 20-30 in here.

Projects that are still on my radar but that I don't plan to move on in the next week or so drop into Held, I usually have between 50-75 in here.

The ones that are 3-6 months and beyond stay in Someday Maybe. Some of these in here are physically put on hold, so I see the paused icon, which gives me the visual indication they are very low priority. Others in here are given long start dates which gives me a clock icon on the project. When they become available the icons disappear and either weekly or monthly I give this list a quick scan to see the ones with no icon and give it a quick review to move them up to one of the other folders, pause them or reschedule a new start date to bring them up again later.

During my weekly reviews I will also review most of these projects as their review period triggers. The ones on hold and also in someday maybe tend to have their review periods pushed out to between 2 to 12 months depending on the project.

In addition to my weekly reviews I also tend to quickly browse my project folders every evening and review the Priority and Main project lists, picking my top 3-5 projects to move into Priority etc. At weekends I also give the held and main list a quick scan to see if something needs promoting or demoting for the coming week.

[Derek Zinger]

Sounds like we have ended up with very similar systems, so I suppose my experience isn't particularly new to you :)

I do find a similar issue in dealing with all the various ways to prioritize: flagging, contexts, project folders, due dates, etc. Perhpas the key is to give a hard and fast definition to each one. So for me, for example, a flag means "I want to do this today", whereas the "Current" project folder means "It's on my plate and I need to at least think about it every day until it's done". Due dates would be "This must be done by X date… or else". Once you get these definitions sorted out, OF sems to have all the perspective options to set up whatever kinds of views you need.

This may well be old news to you. Just sharing what I can :)

[DrJJWMac]

Originally Posted by Derek Zinger

... Perhpas the key is to give a hard and fast definition to each one. So for me, for example, a flag means "I want to do this today", whereas the "Current" project folder means "It's on my plate and I need to at least think about it every day until it's done". Due dates would be "This must be done by X date… or else".

I agree, using clear and consistent definitions for the various options in OF is critical. Some of mine are ...

Start Date
--> hide this from consideration until this time (for whatever reason)

Due Date
--> do this by this time or else face a hard/undesirable penalty (from outside)

Flagged
--> do this at the next convenient opportunity

Context: Waiting For
--> get feedback from some other person about this

Context: Someday
--> consider this to do or not to do whenever or never

Otherwise, Folders serve as containers for Areas of Responsibility or Projects, while Contexts define either an approach (consider, propose, do, complete) or a location (errands, home, work) is required.

--
JJW

[Cypher]

Originally Posted by Derek Zinger

Sounds like we have ended up with very similar systems, so I suppose my experience isn't particularly new to you :)

I think our systems have evolved to be more or less the same. My Priority folder is as you say what I plan to do on a project by project basis hopefully today, tomorrow or very soon. When I use flags its more for individual actions I will do Today, these flagged tasks will most often not be on a priority project, but are actions I need to do to keep things moving along on all my other projects. I also try to minimise the number of flags to only 5 or so today.

Due dates gave me the biggest head ache. I love the forecast but I find it really needs due dates to be useful. I use start dates a lot to hide tasks and only get them to show up when I want them to, but without a due date the tasks can get forgotten about once they are on the system and more than a day or two old. Usually I will add a due date just as an alarm that something has slipped but I do end up spending a lot of time adjusting due dates to get rid of all the red that inevitably appears.

My latest evolution of having the Priority Project folder is hopefully my way of combatting that, allowing me to move a realistic number of project into my main focus area and letting the less important ones drop off into the background. I still have to master doing the weekly review properly though and that is the main area I struggle to schedule into my work week. The result is I usually end up spending hours and hours playing catch up every few weekends or so and often feel like I tinker with the system more than I complete tasks.

[Cypher]

Originally Posted by DrJJWMac

Context: Waiting For
--> get feedback from some other person about this

Context: Someday
--> consider this to do or not to do whenever or never

Using the "Waiting For" context has been one of my systems biggest improvements in the last year. I have always used a "waiting for" context, but nothing like as much as I do now. Everything I ask someone, order for delivery, delegate all get a waiting for added to my system. I now regularly annoy people by following up on things I would previous have forgotten about by not collecting it into my trusted system.

"Someday" isn't a context in my system. I give the tasks a real context and put the task or project into a someday folder. I still want to know that the tasks is a phone call, or an errand, so should I put it back into my system I don;t have to think about what it is again. The folder or project name tells me its a Someday for now.

In my system I have a context called "Review and Update" which I think would be the same as your SOMEDAY context. This is a specific context I would put on the next action in a someday maybe or held project. The main actions of the project would still have the normal contexts applied to them and I would make the project a sequential one with the next action as a "Review and Update" context with a start date to remind me to review it.
By having this context in each project it allows me to quickly review all the projects that are in this state by switching focus to this context.

Phil

[Derek Zinger]

Originally Posted by Cypher

The result is I usually end up spending hours and hours playing catch up every few weekends or so and often feel like I tinker with the system more than I complete tasks.

Yeah, I'm seeing a certain balancing act. While it's good that I'm checking in regularly with OF to see what there is to do, I don't want to spend *too* much time managing or tinkering.