The Omni Group
These forums are now read-only. Please visit our new forums to participate in discussion. A new account will be required to post in the new forums. For more info on the switch, see this post. Thank you!

Go Back   The Omni Group Forums > OmniFocus > Applying OmniFocus
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

 
Starting a basic Workflow with OmniFocus Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I'm new to the OmniFocus world but after hearing some podcasts (Mac Power Users and Back to work) hearing the great things about omnifocus I decided to try it out. In the past I've used Toodledo and RTM but neither of them ever felt "complete" to me. I was skeptical of using things like OF or Things because I like the idea of keeping everything in sync. I have a mac laptop at home, mac at work, and an iPad (plus an adroid phone but he's SOL for the moment). But I have my own WebDAV server that I sync with my Dropbox account so I feel pretty comfortable that my main devices will have my data when I needed it. I'm also in the process of going through DA's GTD book so now I'm trying to setup a basic Workflow to get me started.

Folders
From reading through blog posts and forums here it seems folders are mainly used for Areas of Focus. I have the following so far

Business - Projects for a side business I'm planning to start
Clients (With sub-folder per client) for Companies/People I do side work for
Developer - All things Developer focused I do
Home - Projects around the House or with Wife
Personal - Personal projects (my blog, photography, etc)
Work - My 8x5 job

Contexts
This still confuses me a bit on how to uses these effectively, but from everything I've read it seems I just need to jump in and try one system and if it's not working for me change it up to something that is. I fall in the category of I'm always on a computer

@Errands, Stuff to do when I'm out
@Home
@Office - stuff to do when I'm at work but not at the computer (meetings, one-on-ones, etc)

@Mac - Anything that I can do on my mac (I put both Work and non work related here and filter it out using Focus mode)
@Email
@Online
@Direct Reports - Any action that I need to involve one of my direct reports
@Report's name (Context is on-hold) this is how I'm going to try and track delegated tasks I'm waiting for from a specific person
@People (with sub-contexts for people I speak to often) - Actions that need to involve others in my life work and non-work related

@Waiting - Any action that is waiting on something other than my direct reports

Strategy
My approach right now to getting this workflow to work is; Create all my projects in the appropriate folder (area of responsibility). Each action of the project will have a context set appropriate to what I need in order to complete it (Phone, Mac, Office, Etc). Than each day I'm doing work I'll focus to that particular area (i.e. Work when I'm at my real Job). This should hide other actions not under my Work folder if I understand the Focus mode correctly.

Does this seem like a good first step at working OmniFocus into my system? Any comments, advice, or lessons learned from others who may have tried a similar workflow, or pitfalls I may run into starting with this?
 
Looks pretty good! You may want to do some adjusting of the folder structure so that you can easily grab all of your work-related items, or just part of it, for example. Might be worth building up a few perspectives to handle the usual cases. Easy enough to adjust these things, just drag them where you want!

You'll also get some benefit from setting up the perspectives for your usual choices when you're working on the iPad, where you can't pick a folder or two and focus on it, except via a perspective.
 
Thanks for the tips!

I'm going to play around with the perspectives tonight and see what works for me.

Question though. Are perspectives stored as part of the OmniFocus database (meaning they'll sync to my WebDav server) so I can pull them to my Mac at work in the morning?
 
Yes, perspectives are stored in the database, and sync just like other transactions.

One thing to note about perspectives and the iPad is that the iPad currently only supports context-mode perspectives. If you make a project-mode perspective, it will sync, but not be displayed, and the result will look just as if it hadn't synced. So, go to project mode, focus on the folder(s) in question, switch to context mode (cmd-2) and set up the grouping and sorting as you want it, then save the perspective. That should get you a working perspective on the iPad after everything syncs.

Also, on the Mac, in context mode, you can turn on a column to show the project associated with an action. View->Columns->Project. If you also sort by that, you can get a halfway decent facsimile of the project mode view (no hierarchy, but the actions should be correctly ordered, I think).
 
 


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes


Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Starting Over with OmniFocus: Mac + iPhone danglickmd Applying OmniFocus 3 2010-04-05 05:08 PM
Non-GTD workflow using OmniFocus Arrow Applying OmniFocus 4 2009-04-05 06:41 PM
preventing omnifocus from starting up by itself counterpt OmniFocus 1 for Mac 6 2009-01-03 11:08 AM
OmniFocus not syncing; hanging; not starting; etc DragonDave OmniFocus for iPhone 3 2008-09-03 08:20 AM
Using OmniFocus in a GTD workflow AquaMethod OmniFocus 1 for Mac 14 2008-06-28 10:19 PM


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 10:27 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.