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How are we using the reviews? Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I'm having trouble figuring out how to practically fit this into my workflow.
Do you use review in OF? if so how? How does it help?
Cheers,
Shanana
 
Shanana,

I've been using the review dates for a few weeks now and really like them. I set review intervals on all my projects with the most important projects scheduled for very frequent reviews and the on-hold ones and someday-maybes* scheduled less frequently.

During my daily review I look over every active project due for review today.

During my weekly review I look over every on-hold project due for review in the next week.

During my monthly review I look over every someday-maybe project past due for review.

I used to try to do thorough project reviews only during my weekly review. This meant that my weekly review took a long time and I didn't give appropriate attention to each project. Using the review intervals, I only have a small number of projects to review in each daily review and my weekly reviews are more efficient.

One tip, if you set review frequencies using prime numbers you can reduce the likelihood of multiple project reviews piling up on the same day. My active projects have review frequencies of 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, or 17 days. My on-hold and someday-maybe ones have review frequencies of 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, ... weeks.

* I'm tracking someday-maybe projects using folders in OF named "Someday/Maybe" and marked inactive.
__________________
Cheers,

Curt
 
Interesting.

It is one of the features of OF that I have just not used at all as I was unlcear how it was to be used.

In GTD, a weekly review is supposed to cover all projects, on hold, etc, so putting projects in a 1 month review seems to fly in the face of.

That being siad, there are projects like "Buy a dog" that don't need to be reviewed weekly, because I am not going to buy a dog for a year or two.

I will start to play around and see if helps with the weekly review.

BZ
 
I'm waiting for Perspectives to be a bit more developed so getting started on a review can begin with a couple of keystrokes.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by BwanaZulia View Post
In GTD, a weekly review is supposed to cover all projects, on hold, etc, so putting projects in a 1 month review seems to fly in the face of.
I don't do full project reviews in the monthly review. I do look at my someday-maybe projects to see if any should be made active.

Most of my on-hold projects don't need to be reviewed every week. If they needed that, I wouldn't put them on hold. That said, if I need to "clear the decks" for a particularly focused week, I can always put some active projects on hold without changing their review intervals. By virtue of their shorter review intervals, they'll come up again soon.

As far as doing some full project reviews on a daily basis, I was finding that weekly reviews were sometimes not frequent enough for my most important projects. I suspect that the recommended weekly review is just a sweet spot that Allen recommends as about right for most projects. OF's review intervals allow me to customize the review interval for individual projects without having to think about the interval much. I can easily tweak the interval down or up if I feel I'm reviewing it too little or too much. Ultimately I may go back to full project reviews once a week, but so far like my new system.
__________________
Cheers,

Curt
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shanana View Post
I'm having trouble figuring out how to practically fit this into my workflow.
Do you use review in OF? if so how? How does it help?
In my reviews, I do a couple of things. So far I've followed the same practice for daily and weekly reviews. I don't have a model for monthly reviews yet, though Curt gave me some ideas above in the thread.

First, in project view, I group by review, with remaining actions visible, and get a sense of what my priorities ought to be, barring emergencies, for the next few days or couple of weeks (depending on the level of the review). I mark each project set for review "today" (or in the past) as reviewed once I've done that and noted in my journal anything I need to pay more attention to. I do this until there are no more projects listed for review today. Sometimes I'll adjust the review frequency or next review date if I find I'm reviewing a project too frequently or not frequently enough, or if circumstances require that I postpone work on a project to a specific date.

Second, I switch to context view and group by completion date. This is a quick and dirty way to review what I've accomplished; I note milestones in my journal. If tasks seem trivial enough I don't want a record of doing them, I'll delete them. OmniFocus's database structure is robust but I don't necessarily need much clutter!

Currently I keep a separate someday/maybe list in OmniOutliner, which I review from time to time but not on a fixed schedule. As I migrate those to OmniFocus I'll probably adopt some of Curt's strategies. But I'm hoping that OF will eventually make "on hold" projects active, automatically, once their start date arrives. That way I won't need to remember that particular part of the review.

(And, obviously, once perspectives can be managed and renamed, these review steps will become a lot easier to do.)
 
Lots of food for thought coming out of this. Curt, thanks for the detail on what you are doing with them. I think this type of flow will fit very well into my system and I too was struggling with a bunch of projects for which weekly wasn't enough of a review to keep them in effective play. At the same time, reviewing everything everyday isn't working perfectly because it is labour intensive and not that necessary. What was happening for me was a lot more "on the fly" review that would happen when I know I would be much better keeping as a "doing only, review free zone" so I'll give these review intervals a try and see if that helps.
Cheers,
Shanana
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by brianogilvie View Post
once perspectives can be managed and renamed, these review steps will become a lot easier to do.
What I have done to name my perspectives is to download Pref Setter from versiontracker.com and use it to open "com.omnigroup.OmniFocus.plist" (in my home "Preferences" folder). One setting (called a "Key") is "Saved Perspectives." If you drill down, you will find a name for each perspective and can edit it.

You can also delete individual perspectives. That might help until Omni includes the renaming and managing features planned.

P.S. You can also set column widths while you're there, but you have to add keys for that using the names that Xmas gave in an earlier post. That's how I found this work-around. I didn't want to use terminal to set the column width defaults.

Last edited by dhm2006; 2007-08-25 at 05:15 AM.. Reason: Embed the URLs
 
dhm2006: Thanks for the tip! I have Developer Tools installed so I'll use Preference List Editor.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by brianogilvie View Post
I have Developer Tools installed so I'll use Preference List Editor.
Ha! I have Developer Tools installed also. I didn't think to look there for an editor. That would have saved me a lot of effort. Thanks. :D

Last edited by dhm2006; 2007-08-25 at 02:04 PM..
 
 


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