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Suggestions for Declaring OF Bankruptcy Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Recently Lifehacker ran a slew of spring cleaning articles, a number of which I listened to and have certainly improved my day-to-day workflow. One suggestion I've been sitting on is their discussion of Inbox Bankruptcy. Here's the article:

http://lifehacker.com/5512791/declar...-lot-of-stress

The short of it is whenever something is bogging you down, just cut it off and start over. For example, with e-mail, just archive everything and start over, and tell the folks you've been "meaning to" e-mail that everything is gone, and now you're back to square one. I don't need anything like this in e-mail, but I definitely need to rework my Omnifocus workflow.

For me, the idea of starting over seems quite appealing. I've tried to reorganize my projects and actions, and I've gone through to delete superfluous or "never gonna happen" actions. While things seemed a bit cleaner, they are still altogether disorganized. So yeah, I almost feel as though I should start from scratch with a completely new OF database.

My concern is basically just coming to hitting that delete button. I'm worried maybe I'm missing something maybe I'll be losing some vital task or context or whatever.

Any suggestions for a guilt-free way of starting over?
 
I sort of did this a while ago. I had a huge tangled mess of items that I was unlikely to do any time soon and unlikely to even organize any time soon.

So I created several "task basket" projects and marked them On Hold, and dragged more than half of my tasks into them. I had several Task Baskets because there was some slight organization present and I wanted to retain it. As it turns out, it would have been just as well to create a single Task Basket.

Then, in my newly thinned-out system, I created an item "Process ten task basket items into system" and made it repeat every three days.

You could do the same thing with everything in OmniFocus. If I were doing this, I would:

- Make a single "Old Stuff" folder and drag everything from the Projects view into it.
- Rename every single context that's currently in use. For example, "Coding" would be "Old Stuff Coding".
- Set every single context to On Hold.
- Put all those contexts into a single "Old Stuff Contexts" context folder.
- Now that the whole old tangle is hidden, start over. The "On Hold" status and the single folders should make the old stuff relatively easy to ignore in your Perspectives.
- In the new stuff, add a repeating item to do a modest amount of processing of Old Stuff. Fifteen minutes every two days, five items a day, whatever. Process items thoroughly to ensure that you don't get bad stuff into the new system - if you don't know what to do with an item, just pass it by and process something else.

Now, the reprocessing may be a waste of time, but at least you have a relatively clean system while you're at it.

Gardener
 
I'm thinking about doing this too. I have so many projects and actions that are stuck I'm starting to wonder whether I need them.
My problem is that I work from home and focus too much on the 'work' area of my life, those projects seem to move along and get completed and whilst I review everything else weekly, other things never seem to get done.

I think cleaning my system and having less projects which are evenly spread across areas of focus might be the way to go.
 
 


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