Descarca Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac

The Omni Group’s OmniFocus is a complex to-do application for the Mac, and it’s equally complex in iPhone form. While overkill for some, users who like the Getting Things Done workflow. For projects such as this, you can use Folders in OmniFocus to group multiple projects together. From the Projects perspective (tap Projects in the sidebar or home screen), you can create a project folder by tapping the plus button in the toolbar and choosing New Folder from the popup. So shortly after we shipped OmniFocus 1 we started hearing a lot from customers that were using OmniFocus and trying to use it at work, but they weren't necessarily able to bring their Mac to work. And so they were looking for something else.

1. Descarca Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac Free
2. Descarca Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac Download
3. Descarca Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac 2

As I prepared for my, I took the opportunity to step back from the application to look at the way I use it. I figured it couldn’t hurt to share this with those of you who may be considering the app or struggling to find your own way with it. This post won’t be for everyone, but I hope it will help those (like me) who tend to learn by watching/hearing how others approach a specific tool. This won’t be a thorough look at. Just a thorough look at how I use it. Mac, iPhone and/or iPad I own all three versions, but I tend to do the majority of my work on the Mac, with the occasional use of the for capturing tasks and taking a peek at the day. The is by far the nicest looking version of the app, but the limitations of iOS keep me from ever getting all that serious about using it.

Projects and Folders At first, this sidebar served only as a place to drop all of my projects and to get a quick overview of just how much I was attempting to tackle. As I put more of my life into the app this became unwieldy. So I started creating folders that grouped logical projects together, but I still couldn’t make much sense of things. Turns out I was going about it wrong (or at least wrong for me). Rather than taking a bottom up approach to projects and folders, I made a switch to top down. Folders I started by creating five folders that represent the most essential aspects of my life (or “horizons of focus” as we GTD junkies like to call them) including Home, Work, Web, Personal and Family. I also keep a top-level Single Actions list that functions more like an Inbox for me (more on this in a bit).

In each area, I determined key areas for each folder to determine where my attention should be. For example the Web includes my site, my podcasts, my newsletter with Mike Vardy and any guest work I do for other sites.

Projects Once these folders were established, I set my sights on reviewing and recreating my projects. Once the essential aspects and key areas were defined, the projects fell into place. While they were still logical groupings of tasks, my folder structure often served as a gut check to make sure that the projects I took on made sense to help me achieve my goals. If a project didn’t help achieve a goal, I’d either have to determine if a goal was missing, redefine the project to align it with my goals or, best yet, abandon it. Contexts There are two kinds of contexts when it comes to OmniFocus: the Context field which allows for one context per task and actual contexts which are a person, place or thing needed to accomplish a specific task. Ask 100 people about how they use contexts and you will get 100 answers.

Here’s mine: The Context Field When I first started using OmniFocus, I used a traditional contexts hierarchy that leveraged all of the people, places and things in my life. As almost every task involved multiple people, places or things, this fell apart. There’s also the added challenge that things like email can be done on at least four devices that I own, many of which can be used just about anywhere.

I looked at the approaches used by others, including those that added contexts for energy levels, but over time I found that I only really needed two: Work and Home. Of all the crossover in my life, there’s a clear split between the things I do for my job and just about everything else. These contexts are all I need to power my perspectives, and despite some minor flaws, it’s proven to be the most usable for me (more on said flaws in the perspectives section).

True Contexts Convenient as the two context approach is, it has limits. It lets me focus in on my mindset (which tends to be very different when I’m doing my job vs. My own pursuits), but it doesn’t do much to help me batch tasks together. This is where “True Contexts” come in, and by that I mean all of the people, places and things required to do a task. I no longer need to put much thought into what I put into the context field (considering there are only two options), but I put tremendous thought into how I name my tasks.

By adding contexts into the task name, such as, “Email Bill re: Meeting time,” I can use search in OmniFocus to group tasks. If I’m going to be working on email, I can use the search field in OmniFocus to see any task that includes the word email. If I’m going to be seeing Bill, I can search for any tasks that may relate to him.

Combine this with project and context filters, and I can get very granular, very quickly. Is this perfect? If I had a task titled, “Call to Bill about his Email,” it would show up when searching for things I need to email. Does it work for me despite this minor shortcoming? The Inbox As you may have gathered from the section above, the naming and creation of tasks is a very intentional act. With intent in mind, I tend to avoid a very common step in OmniFocus: sending tasks to the Inbox. For many, the Inbox is a great place to throw things; for me, it’s a place to add clutter and another place I need to check.

To avoid this I do my best to provide all of the information I’ll need when I look back at a newly created task later on. When I’m not sure about the project (which tends to be the biggest outlier for me when creating a task), I’ll add it to my Single Actions list rather than dropping it into the Inbox or omitting it. When I do my weekly review, any incomplete tasks in this list get reviewed to see if projects have emerged from any these single actions.

As for the Inbox itself, there is one case where I do find it useful. If I want to brain dump (read: create a ton of tasks at once), I will just start creating tasks that only include a name (and often not the final one I’ll use), but this is just to get everything out of my head. I tend to immediately refine these after creating them. Brain dumps tend to be far more successful when I figure out what I want to do (or not do) with the crap that just fell out of my head.

Tasks Much as this may be a taboo (or possibly even wrong), I don’t put every task into OmniFocus. Just the ones that OmniFocus is going to help me accomplish. The most obvious omissions are various types of to-dos that I leave out of this system in favor of more focused tools (e.g., reminders live in Due, lists live in Listary, habits in Good Habit and my appointments live in Gcal/Fantastical). I also tend to leave certain aspects of my creative work outside of these kinds of systems entirely. While OmniFocus does wonders to keep me on track when I have an article due for someone else, it proves to be more of a burden than a benefit when attempting to use it to track the writing for my own site. The creation of tasks is nearly as important to me as what constitutes a task.

This intentional approach does wonders to ensure I actually remember what the hell it was I wanted to do at the time of creation. Here’s my approach: Task Name I always try to balance clarity and brevity. My hope is that if I were hit by a bus, a relatively intelligent person could look at my list and figure out what I wanted to do (primarily because when I’m not clear, I often look back at a task and have no earthly concept of what I meant). I also try to make each name a specific action. Stupid as this may seem, “Email Bill re: Vacation Days” or “Call Bill re: Vacation Days” tend to get done faster than “Talk to Bill re: Vacation Days,” which requires me to think about how I’m going to communicate with him.

Descarca Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac Free

Project I tend to skirt the line between best practices and what works for me. There are some people who love to get super granular with projects. By GTD standards anything that requires more than one step is, in fact, a project. I try to boil the task down to the most reasonable starting place, as it can get a little nuts. As much as “Call Bill re: Vacation Days” requires that I check to see if I have a number for Bill, it’s rare that I would make this a separate task.

This gets me in trouble every now and again (like when I go to change light bulbs around the house but have run out), but I find the sanity of a more manageable task list to be worth the tradeoff of occasionally not having exactly what I need for common tasks. Don’t get me wrong, I can see the benefits of this approach, but the practice drove me insane. I found myself spending more time time managing projects than doing them. I also found that creating these kinds of micro-projects often slowed down task creation.

My current approach (which is still a work in progress) is to assign tasks to existing projects. If a new project name is not readily apparent to me, I drop the task in my Single Actions list. If I know the name of the project, I’ll create it using the on-the-fly functionality in the OmniFocus Quick Entry or Clipper, but not file the new project into a proper folder. This ensures that it gets a good, hard look during my weekly review. During this same review, I will also scan through the Single Actions folder to see if any of the actions should be added to a new or existing project. Context When creating a task, I always require that it get either the Work or Home context to ensure it shows up in the proper perspective (more on this in a minute).

I run into the occasional challenge where a task can or should be done anywhere (more on this in the section on Perspectives), but I force myself to choose one and get on with things. Start Date Start dates were a game changer for me. They allow me to not think about something until I need to think about it. While I love the idea of capture, I hate the idea of reviewing something weekly that won’t matter for some time. When creating a task, I’m a big fan of using a start date to help shield the task from my view until the time is right or until I am doing a more thorough review. Due Date Since adding start dates, I’ve really dialed back on the use of due dates. There are only two cases where I will add a due date: if there is a true drop dead date by which a task or project needs to be completed or if there is a firm date where I need to make use of the information in a task.

They are most commonly used to keep me from missing deadlines or obligations. They’re also one of the only instances where I will use badges on my computer and iOS devices to ensure that they are not missed. Time I don’t put estimated timeframes into my tasks and hide this.

I prefer to make these determinations when planning my days. Notes It’s rare that I manually add notes, although it has been known to happen.

Notes are most commonly created through the OmniFocus Clipper or by some Keyboard Maestro macro. Quick Entry and Clipper This is how most tasks are created in OmniFocus. While I tend to add tasks directly into the application during reviews, most get entered after hitting a keyboard shortcut for firing up either the quick entry or clipper pop-ups. The two are essentially the same, the one difference being that the clipper will add highlighted text and, in many cases, a link back to relevant materials including email messages. Over time I’ve also created “hacks” that let me and using the clipper.

(I also have a super geeky one that lets me automatically send files to Evernote and then create a new task with a link to the file. Clearly, I have a problem ) Both the clipper and quick entry boxes allow me to create one or more tasks while entering all of the fields listed in the tasks section above. Perspectives Perspectives allow me to create specific views for specific mindsets. For example, my Work perspective offers up only the tasks that are relevant to what I am doing there at the time (in other words, they have a context of Work and if there’s a start date available, it is current). Since I can set a keyboard shortcut for each, I can cycle through all of my various contexts with ease. By default, my work computer opens OmniFocus to a perspective that focuses in on my work, while my personal computer centers around my broader Home context.

Note: This approach does have its limitations, the biggest one being that I can’t have seamless Anywhere tasks for things that could show up in both my Work and Home Perspectives. There are ways to work around this, but the limitation often forces me to make a determination between a Work or Home context for tasks that could be ubiquitous. Reviews While many love the OmniFocus iPad app for reviews, I’m still old school and prefer to do these on my Mac. I have two perspectives setup for my reviews. A weekly review perspective that shows me tasks that have reached or do not have a start date and one that shows me everything, including items with a start date that could be well in the future for more in-depth monthly reviews. The Overall Look The default OmniFocus design on the Mac leaves a lot to be desired. While we expect to see this improve in the upcoming 2.0 version, I’ve never let this bother me all that much.

The app allows users to tweak the look to suit their own tastes, but I’ve never changed a design setting. I always figured that once I started, I’d never stop. While I haven’t changed the default design, I have changed the various views.

One of my favorite things for OmniFocus is the ability to set different default views for different perspectives. At work, all I see are my tasks sorted by project. It doesn’t show the sidebar with my projects and folders, or the header with navigation. At home, I take a broader approach to my work.

I tend to move around a lot more, so I like to have access to the header. The Bottom Line The theme for is that the app is something different for everyone. The longer I use it, and the more I listen to people talk about how they use it (which I admit, I probably do too much of), the more I find this to be true. In a recent episode of Gabe Weatherhead’s, he was talking to Jeff Hunsberger about the app.

Jeff was sharing how flexible the app is, while Gabe commented that he occasionally finds himself frustrated by its rigidity. I think that the truth lives right between those two statements, that OmniFocus is flexible as to which rigidity you settle on. You have to choose a way to use the app, even if that means accepting a few trade-offs along the way, but when you take the time to find a way that works works for you, I doubt there’s another application that comes close. Note: I may try to see if I can get a few other OmniFocus geeks to provide a similar overview. Let me know what you think of this idea in the comments.

Don’t you have any tasks that have to be done at certain places? It can be a list of things my mother needs done when I go to hers or it can be something to do with a particular client and his or her office. So I use contexts for that, I use geo-fencing a great deal, but it does mean I have an enormous number of contexts. I’d love to see a way to cut that down to just the two you have but it’s beyond me.

Have you figured this one out or does it just not come up with you?

Custom perspectives is one of the main features that OmniFocus 3 offers that allows you to create a pre-saved view of your projects and tasks for quick referral. I have always longed for a way to create perspective groups because I have a long list of perspectives. Disclaimer: The screenshots shown in this post reflect a beta test product. Features and appearances may change in the final version 3.0. Problem: Too many perspectives creates a long Perspectives Menu I wanted a way to have distinct groups of perspectives in OmniFocus 3. I demonstrated a perspective grouping in OmniFocus 2 using the top toolbar for my Planning perspectives and the Perspectives sidebar for my Doing perspectives. image I am always interested in doing a to refine my workflows.

When something doesn’t feel quite right, I’d like to get to the root of the problem. I introduced a workflow where I arranged my workflow in OmniFocus into a group of planning perspectives (located at the top toolbar in OmniFocus) and a group of doing perspectives (located at the left sidebar). You can revisit that workflow here: My personal setup has four distinct perspective groups:. Contexts - This perspective group contains a list and of common GTD contexts that I frequently find myself in. This is a shortened list of some of my frequently used contexts. This is most frequently used as my Doing perspectives.

Physical Location - @House, @Office, @Hardware Store. Tool - @Computer, @Phone, @Online. Situation - @Morning, @Afternoon, @Evening.

End-Of-Day Review - At the end of the day, I run through a series of perspectives to follow up on today’s activities and prepare for the next day. This is my daily review.

Planning - I use this perspective group when I need to go into Planning mode. Perspectives include: Projects, Tags, Completed, Changed, and Review.

Checklists - This perspectives group contains all of my checklists. This is a convenient way to access any lists that I refer to throughout the day. Grouping my perspectives using fake custom perspectives An effective way to group my perspectives is to create a custom perspective with the Pro edition of OmniFocus 3.

Use the Perspective Editor ( Perspectives Show Perspectives) to add a title header. Here is a sample of my perspectives groups on my iPad. OmniFocus 3 for Mac has eliminated the ability to put custom perspectives in the top toolbar. I was able to overcome this by using Keyboard Maestro. It’s an invaluable app that just sneaks up on you. You don’t realize how much you can do with KM until you find use case scenarios for it.

Grouping my perspectives using Keyboard Maestro Keyboard Maestro is a MacOS X automation app that expands the capabilities of your Mac. You can find KM here: I created different palettes that hold a group of related perspectives. Watch the video of my Perspective Groups. Creating my OmniFocus 3 Perspectives Group I start up Keyboard Maestro and choose Launch Keyboard Maestro Editor Select File New Macro Group.

You’ll be creating a macro group which will contain the different tiles that will invoke the perspective chosen. Change the macro group settings to show:. Available in these applications: OmniFocus. Available in all windows.

Show a palette until: the hot key is pressed If you want this palette to be visible in any app then choose Available in all applications. Change your hotkey to a keyboard combination of your choice. You can also customize the icon by dragging an imagine to the top left to the KM Macro Editor. Click on Palette style to see an example of your KM Macro Group. KM Macro groups will default to show the Macro Group as a standard palette window: If you turn on Shrink, your palette will shrink into an icon.

Hover the cursor over the icon to expand the icon into a full palette. Shrinking the palette is helpful for Macs with smaller screens. Creating the the Perspectives inside the Macro Group Select File New Macro to create the first macro for this group. Add an icon if you desire.

Set the Menu Title to Perspectives. Next, set the Menu Item to the Perspective’s name. This KM macro simulates going up to the Perspectives menu and selecting the perspective. KM has a habit of sorting the title alphabetically. I added a number before the perspective name to enforce my personal sort preferences.

Descarca Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac Download

Download the KM Macro Group file linked below and change the perspective names to fit your OmniFocus setup. You can duplicate this macro group to have multiple perspective palettes. As an added bonus, I was able to initiate the iOS Homescreen which features two columns. Change the palette style and enter ‘2’ into the Columns field.

This will simulate the home screen that you get when using OmniFocus 3 for iOS. Keyboard Maestro is a popular app that can add palettes to any app that you may have. Personally, I’m terrible at remembering hot key combinations. Sometimes I like having palettes on screen to remind me of a workflow that I should be performing. I also like having palettes to choose some of my most common actions in an app. I hope you enjoyed this little demonstration.

I’m just getting back into Keyboard Maestro myself. Thanks to and for giving me the idea to use KM to create customized palettes for OmniFocus 3 for Mac. Resources Keyboard Maestro - Download the OmniFocus 3 palette zip file. Shared with Dropbox.

Descarca Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac 2

I’ve found that creating routines simplifies life. I can create a routine and go through the motions. I have found that I may skip a step or two which can lead to disastrous results.

I make assumptions and things fall out of the radar. My End-Of-The-Day review does this for me. I go through each of the different perspectives that I need to check up to prepare for the next day. I’m already thinking of another palette for my Weekly Review and Monthly Review. I’m not sure where that fits in yet. I wanted to get the Daily Review workflow out of the way first before I start working on the Weekly Review.

I think I got the idea of the checklist after listening to one of ’s podcasts Mike loves his coffee and he’s trying to drag Joe along. But that still doesn’t stop them from talking checklists and the power they hold. Ruby Coffee Roasters Bitsbox – Super Powers Kit The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande BrainChains. I hadn’t ever thought about having these palettes triggered via mouseover like this. That’s an interesting approach. A “related” trick with KM palettes that I really enjoy is when you assign multiple items to the same key trigger.

Right now you have a palette set to show when using a single keyboard shortcut and then auto-expand with your mouseover. However if you change it to: “Always activated”. Then assign the same keyboard shortcut to each item, the palette will show and you can use your keyboard to pick the item and the palette will auto-hide afterward. Example Video: What I’m doing in the video:. Pressing 'CMD+OPT+ALT+SHIFT (HYPER) + A. This activates my top applications palette. Then I can press the first letter of the item to select it from the palette.

I have set them all to be specific single letters to differentiate similar items. After initiating the palette, I press the “S” key to switch to Sublime. I can then initiate the palette again, press “S” to hide Sublime. So if you assigned all of your initial perspectives to “CTRL+OPT+G”, then you could press that key combo, and immediately hit “2” to jump to your Projects. As always thanks for the detailed write-up of your workflows. Always a beneficial read.

I hadn’t thought of this previously but as you know, Wilson, I have a complicated relationship with the sidebar in OmniFocus 3. I think I’m going to use the palette idea to keep the sidebar hidden most of the time. I may get a little adventurous and switch it on and off automatically as I enter and leave Projects or Tags. For the benefit of others, note that you can put a numerical marker on macros to affect the sorting in a palette.

The format is a two-digit number followed by a ) so you could sort the perspectives in the example macro group like this: which produces: Excellent work,! It’s bound to be quite valuable for all the perspective power users out there. Wilsonng: Thanks. I’ve found that creating routines simplifies life. I can create a routine and go through the motions. I have found that I may skip a step or two which can lead to disastrous results.

I make assumptions and things fall out of the radar. My End-Of-The-Day review does this for me.

I go through each of the different perspectives that I need to check up to prepare for the next day. I agree regarding routines and checklists. Currently as I’m away from home I’m realizing some of my routines/checklists might be a bit too excessive and put too much pressure on me to get all of them done. Maybe I might have a simplified checklist for when I’m busy and a more complicated one when not. Also debating printing out reoccurring checklists to then laminate and check off with a dry erase marker.

Ideas and decisions.