[abates17]

I have been trying to move over from Life Balance to OmniFocus, and I am running into some problems with OF. Can someone help me figure out these issues?

1. Projects vs. Actions: I am confused about why there is a distinction between Projects and Actions. For example, I can have a project like “Change the oil in my car” that is also technically an action, but needs to be broken up into smaller tasks. Or I could have an action like, “Have lunch with Joe” that may require additional sub-actions, like “Call Joe and figure out a day for lunch.”*But since OF treats Projects and Actions differently, I get strange interactions, like one-off actions that are not part of a project, so I either have to file them in Miscellaneous (which is different then how I would organize them), or I have to create a “Miscellaneous Tasks” project, and then only the first of my one-off tasks will show up as the Next Action.

It seems like a lot of these problems would be solved if Projects and Actions were treated as interchangeable. Another solution would be to allow users to turn off Next Actions, so that ANY valid action was highlighted and shown as available.

And speaking of which, why don’t projects have an entry in the Context column? I have to go into the Inspector to set the default context, which seems like an unnecessary additional step.

2. Nested Contexts: Another feature I really like in Life Balance is that Contexts (called Places in LB) can be nested. So for example, I can define that Work contains Phone Daytime, Computer, and Email. Then, when I set my location to Work, the only tasks that show up are ones that can be done at any of those places. I don’t know why I should have to distinguish between each context, or why Work: Phone has to be a different context than Home: Phone.

So my quandary now is: Go with OF, which has much better functionality for automatic data entry? Or stick with Life Balance, which has more flexible organization and doesn’t lock me into the “Every project must have only one Next Action” model?

Any suggestions or advice are welcome.

[abates17]

Okay, more thoughts while I’m thinking them:

Again, I don’t know why Action Groups are distinguished from Actions. It seems like a pointless distinction. For example, I make a new action, “Sell car to Mike.” Then I remember that oh, I need to get a smog check and duplicate title first. So I make sub-actions, “Get smog check”*and “order duplicate title from DMV” to the “Sell car” action. Now when I complete those actions, “Sell car” no longer shows up as an action on my list…because it has been converted to an Action Group, and is not a valid Action anymore. An Action Group without any uncompleted sub-actions should just show up as an Action. Again, I don’t understand this distinction.

[CatOne]

Anything that requires more than one action is pretty much defined as a project by GTD. So that's your difference. "Tune up car" is not an action, it is a project. Unless you have some newfangled car which can be completely tuned up by pushing a big button that says "Auto-tune." And if you have one, let me know what it is, mechanics charge > $100/hour around these parts... book rate is $140/hour ;-)

You can also nest contexts in OmniFocus. E.g.

Office
- phone
- computer
-- email
-- web
- read

... etc.

Also, you can customize the columns pretty much anywhere there _are_ columns (right click, or control-click, on the menu and select the columns you want).

I think you may need to spend some more time with OmniFocus. It is very flexible, and quite powerful, but it has a fairly steep initial learning curve (one of the main knocks on it, compared to some recent competition). Still, it can be customized to do everything you asked about. But I'd suggest when you fire it up, you initially just create one action:

Read OmniFocus Manual.

:-)

[abates17]

What I am saying about actions versus projects is that it is a false distinction. Something could start off as an action, then become a project when you look more closely at it and realize how complex it really is. “Take car in for tune-up” could be a simple action, or it could end being a project if you have to look up the address, talk to your mechanic, and so on. But once you have done all that, it is back to being an action again. If you do GTD on a piece of paper, the paper doesn’t care if you mentally classify something as a project or action. So why should OmniFocus? Why are these treated differently

I realize you can customize columns; I am saying that (for example) in the Projects view, every task has a displayed context, but groups and projects do not have their default context displayed. Instead, I have to right-click or go to the Inspector to change that. It seems like the default context should appear in that same column.

I am also aware that you can nest contexts, but that is not what I’m talking about (and maybe I didn’t phrase it correctly). Here is an example: I have a phone at home, at work, in my car…okay, pretty much everywhere. So with Life Balance, I can note that “Car” contains the context “Phone,”*as do “Work” and “Home.”*So when I assign something to Phone, that task shows up if my location is set to Work, or Home, or Car. I don’t have to create separate contexts like “Work: Phone”*or “Home: Phone.”*I can say that my Home contains Computer, Phone, and Wife, and anything from any of those contexts shows up when I am at Home. Does that make sense?

[Brian]

So, in a total Ellen Feiss moment, the forum ate my first response. So, for try two, I'm doing a bunch of smaller posts to limit the potential damage. :-)

Originally Posted by abates17

1. Projects vs. Actions: I am confused about why there is a distinction between Projects and Actions. For example, I can have a project like “Change the oil in my car” that is also technically an action, but needs to be broken up into smaller tasks. Or I could have an action like, “Have lunch with Joe” that may require additional sub-actions, like “Call Joe and figure out a day for lunch.”

We treat them differently because they're different. ;-)

Less cheekily, and borrowing a quote from David Allen's book:

I define a project as any desired result that requires more than one action step. This means that some rather small things that you might not normally call projects are going to be on your "Projects" list. The reasoning behind my definition is that if one step won't complete something, some kind of stake needs to be placed in the ground to remind you that there's something still left to do.

In other words, completing the last action in a project doesn't automatically mean that the project is complete. It's often useful during a review to take a last look and say "is there anything else to do?". If the answer to that question is 'no', then you complete the project.

However, if I'm not reviewing - if I'm in doing-mode rather than planning-mode - I don't want to stop and ask that question right now. I want to do some other action from some other project.

If projects and actions were equivalent, I'd either have a bunch of clutter on my action list, or I'd have to stop and flip into planning-mode every time I considered checking of an action-which-is-really-a-project. The distinction isn't perfect, but it isn't meaningless, and throwing it out is going to cause problems. :-)

[Brian]

Originally Posted by abates17

But since OF treats Projects and Actions differently, I get strange interactions, like one-off actions that are not part of a project, so I either have to file them in Miscellaneous (which is different then how I would organize them), or I have to create a “Miscellaneous Tasks” project, and then only the first of my one-off tasks will show up as the Next Action.

If you really want one-off projects, I'd group them into folders that described the larger groups you're after.

The option I would probably recommend would be to make the Miscellaneous project into a single-action list; even when the Next Action filter is selected, all the available actions in a SA list are shown.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by abates17

It seems like a lot of these problems would be solved if Projects and Actions were treated as interchangeable.

Hopefully the post above showed that doing this would cause other problems. We try to make it easy to promote an action to a project (or demote a project to an action in some other project) as needed, but the distinction isn't meaningless for most of our users.

Originally Posted by abates17

Another solution would be to allow users to turn off Next Actions, so that ANY valid action was highlighted and shown as available.

It sounds like you want to select View -> Status Filter -> Available; next actions will still be colored purple, but any action you can work on will appear in the window.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by abates17

And speaking of which, why don’t projects have an entry in the Context column? I have to go into the Inspector to set the default context, which seems like an unnecessary additional step.

Not every project has a default context, and for the ones that do, it's the kind of thing you set once and then never touch again. We just didn't think it was something folks would want to have visible 100% of the time.

That said, there's a feature request open on making them settable without requiring a trip to the inspector - from the context menu, for example. If you'd like to see this changed, use the Help menu to shoot an email to the Support Ninjas; they can add your feedback to the development database.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by abates17

2. Nested Contexts: Another feature I really like in Life Balance is that Contexts (called Places in LB) can be nested. So for example, I can define that Work contains Phone Daytime, Computer, and Email. Then, when I set my location to Work, the only tasks that show up are ones that can be done at any of those places. I don’t know why I should have to distinguish between each context, or why Work: Phone has to be a different context than Home: Phone.

We have a feature that lets you do what you're after without having multiple phone contexts. The feature is called called Perspectives, and it offers control over what contexts are active and a bunch of additional stuff.

Check the "Using perspectives to store your OmniFocus window settings" topic under the help menu for the basics.

More specifically, what you want to do to set up (for example) your Work perspective:
Switch to context view
Command-select the various contexts that apply, including the phone context.
Select View -> Focus on <list of selected contexts>
Select Perspectives -> Save Window as new Perspective
Name the new perspective (and optionally assign a keyboard shortcut).

[Brian]

Originally Posted by abates17

Again, I don’t know why Action Groups are distinguished from Actions.

Action groups are an uncomfortable compromise between at least two groups of folks - one camp uses action groups as just another action that needs checking off. The other group wants the ability to say "I need to think about this some more, so I don't want to check this off. I also don't want to block the rest of the steps in the project from completing". Your example would indicate that you fall into the first camp :-)

If you do a forum search for "action group" there were tons of threads back in 2007; it was one of the truly epic battles of the sneaky peek period.

Needless to say, while the current solution gives folks what they want, it's confusing. I know the team plans to revisit this topic.