Omnifocus priorities1/5/2024 I’m an extremely diligent GTD ( Getting Things Done) practitioner and frankly, both my personal and professional lives would be a mess without it. I’ve been using OmniFocus for about a year now and it seems like the right time to post a comprehensive review of it and how it’s worked for me. I'm not always the best at sticking to it, but I know if I trust my previous self that I have a greater tendency to create flow and accomplish more by the end of the day. For me, the problem can arise when I start re-thinking my previous decisions that led to the list in the first place. You can become numb to seeing them every day if you skip one day, it becomes easy to skip them the next or you start looking through the list, get overwhelmed by it, and do nothing. Each day these tasks show up without me needing to do anything. The nice thing about this Dashboard is that it is mostly robotic. Sometimes these apply to the projects on my Important Projects list, but often times they are simple one-off tasks that are bugging me and I want done. But I fill the remainder of my day's work with tasks that I've flagged. For me, that means five days out from the assigned date. The due soon tasks show up automatically based on how close I am to the due date. Once all reviews and important tasks are completed, I move on to the tasks that will be due soon or that I've decided to work that today. Again, these two projects are flagged to add them to the Dashboard. I need to have this week's content created before I move on to other work for the week. This project holds a few tasks that come after the Important Projects tasks. I do my best to write two articles for this site and record one podcast episode each week. The second meta project is called Weekly Creation and it repeats weekly. These aren't tasks themselves but they prompt me to go elsewhere in OmniFocus to complete a task that pertains to the original item. It's a simple list that helps me put valued projects first and it's the first thing I do once my reviews are completed. The first is called Important Projects and it's set to repeat daily. Underneath my reviews are a couple meta projects I've put in place to help me accomplish my weekly commitments and the projects that are important to me. Again, these projects are flagged and all their tasks are given the context, so these tasks show up in the first grouping of the Dashboard. The system must be up-to-date beforehand. I can't make decisions about which projects to take on or drop if there are still unprocessed tasks in my inbox. The same goes for the monthly and annual reviews. I need to complete my daily review before I go on to the weekly review. The projects at the very top are my reviews: daily, weekly, monthly, and annual in that order. The flag is what pulls them into the Dashboard and the context ensures they will always be at the top. I should also note that all projects in this Guidance folder are flagged and their tasks are given the context. With the Dashboard sorted by project, the tasks within the context groupings maintain the priority I give my projects. Again, I want these at the top of the list because these projects keep my daily activities in alignment with my long-term goals. It holds my higher horizons, reviews, and meta projects. See a theme here? At the top of my project list is a folder called Guidance. I also sort my projects in order of importance. With the perspective grouped by context, it first sorts the tasks by context and with the context at the top of my list, it shows up first on the Dashboard. I want to trust that I have all the appropriate information collected and in place before I move on. If the task impacts the state of my system and accuracy of the projects in it, I want that task to be completed first. And I give my tasks the highest priority. I keep my contexts in order of importance from top to bottom. As for the display settings, I want it to group tasks by context but sort by project. The task needs to have a due date within the next five days or I must manually flag it before it shows up here. All the Dashboard contains are tasks that are Due or Flagged. There's no need to choose the next task because I've already decided ahead of time.īefore I get too far into this, let's go through the setup. I want those tasks to be shown in order, meaning I start at the top and work to the bottom. The intent behind the Dashboard is to show me a list of tasks to be completed today. And that's for good reason: it's the central hub of my day-to-day work and the place where my decisions about the day surface. I write and talk about my OmniFocus Dashboard a lot.
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