[sgrunspan]

I'd been using gtd and omnifocus in my energy retrofit business for two years. Besides personal projects omnifocus helped me manage the general admin of the company and retrofit projects very well. These projects are detailed but not especially complex so something like a MS project or omni plan seemed inappropriate.

However, my business has grown and instead of 1-2 projects a month I have 240 projects over the next 12 months. Ive tried to create folders by region, sub folders by planned calendar dates and finally projects by property

But this is unwieldy and it makes reviews counter productive-if I try to review all in on shot. Imagine how many times in reviewing 240 projects you come across something that would only take 2 minutes to do?

Have I just outgrown my belved OF or can I be using it smart?

[Oogiem]

I don't think you've outgrown the tool. I typically have between 200-220 active projects at any given time and between 500-600 that are on-hold. One feature I use to deal with the review process is to set the review times on projects appropriately. Some only need reviewing every month or every quarter while others are done weekly.

Another issue I see with how you are doing things is the idea of doing actions during reviews. I don't try to do 2 minute actions during review. If it was a 2 minute action it should have been done when I processed that input and never made it onto my OF list at all. So you might review how you handle new inputs and how you process those inputs into your system to see if you are missing something there.

[whpalmer4]

You hit nail on the head — trying to review all of your projects at once with that many projects either leads to a sloppy job or putting it off (or both). OmniFocus has support for having each project have its own individual review schedule (both interval and next review date). Instead of trying to review all of your projects at once, divide the load up and do a smaller portion every day. Projects which need more attention can be assigned a shorter review interval. When they no longer need such close attention, give them a longer review interval. To get started, take a count of your projects and divide it by 7. Select 1/7 of your projects, bring up the inspector, and set their next review date to be today. Take another 1/7 and set it to be tomorrow. Continue in this fashion until you've set a next review date for every project. Now each day you open the Review perspective and review the projects that appear there in the Review today group (or earlier groups if you skipped a day), using the Edit->Mark Reviewed command (command-shift-R) or the optional toolbar Mark Reviewed button (use View->Customize Toolbar... to add it) to mark each project as reviewed.

If you dice your projects up into suitably small pieces, you can use this as a tactic to make sure all of your projects keep moving along by doing at least one action from each project before marking it reviewed. You don't have to do it while reviewing; if you do the reviewing at the end of the day, and you turn on the completion date column in that perspective, you can easily see if the project being reviewed had some work done before marking it reviewed. If not, you could do it on the spot, or flag a task to be done tomorrow. Just keep chipping away!