If you’ve ever wondered about the biggest thing that Omnifocus does then this video is for you. You’ll be learning about how to “Plan Like a Master” in a short 10 minute video and learn one important thing — what to avoid putting into Omnifocus. This is a follow up from Part 1 “How Omnifocus Quick Entry Captures Everything” (click here).
The first thing you learn about is just creating a project. Easy enough right? Omnifocus brings Omnioutliner’s outlining power into it so you can break down a big project like “turn the world blue” into a lot of smaller actions that will make it happen.
Next you find out that you can go a step further. What if “turn the world blue” is only one part of your master plan to “take over the world?” like Pinky and the Brain? Well then all you have to do is create a folder for the project.
If you follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done you’ll find Omnifocus was designed for that system from the get go. Your top level folder can be the big overall “life goal” for example or “your life” and then you can break it down into smaller pieces.
In the video the examples of house and car are used. You can then create projects that will help you manage these other areas of your life. ”Take care of Kyla”, “Clean the car after the road trip” and other projects are good examples in the case of Jon’s life.
In addition, keeping your project titles short will keep Omnifocus fast and lean. Write a longer description of the project in Notes using Command + ‘ (apostrophe). Same for the folder names.
Finally you get one important point about Omnifocus — avoid clipping movies, pictures and sound clips if possible especially from Web sites or email. You can if you want however it can really slow the whole task or project management system down.
Expect a Part 3: What Due Dates Do For You in Omnifocus next.
3 Tricks for Scheduling Due Dates in Record Time (in Omnifocus) [Video]
Omnifocus Series Part 3
(Psst…. Looking for the “missing tricks”? Look below!)
Have you ever realized that you could set due dates without looking at your calendar? Omnifocus has a nifty trick for due dates that will make your life easier. In this follow up to Part 1 and Part 2, you will learn about this useful hack so setting due dates in task managers like Omnifocus or Things is a snap.
Go to the inspector for Omnifocus and enter the due date you want without typing the month, day or year. Let’s say you have to meet someone named Karin “next Monday”. All you have to do is enter next Monday and Omnifocus will figure out the exact month, day and year.
This works for:
So on and so forth.
In fact, you can skip the typing in the full “Monday” and just use short forms like “Mon” or “mon”. Avoid shortening for “weeks” (avoid wk or wks) and even “years” (avoid yr or yrs) — use the full form for these ones.
If you want you can even specify the time. Here’s an example: ”2 weeks 5 pm.” Omnifocus figures out the date and time yet again. And this works well if you…
Have a Calendar!?
Specifically iCal that is. You can actually go to Omnifocus’ Preference menu, select the iCal icon and menu and setup the Sync.
If you have specified an exact time then Omnifocus will put the action item in the right time slot. If you want to setup alerts or reminders however you’ll have to do it right in iCal (Omni Group is probably working on that as we speak). Omnifocus can also narrow down which kinds of actions you want to put into the calendars and which calendars you want to put them into.
Watch out though because if you have lots and lots of items with due dates your calendars could become hard to read. Personally I tend to avoid using the sync because I have so many due dates that can come around (and the triple reminders that come with it).
If you want to set reminders, you can use the rule of 3 kind of like this.
Change it as needed. It’ll give you a leg up in getting to your appointments in time.
In Summary
Omnifocus can make setting due dates a lot easier. In fact this is a little trick I completely missed until just recently. I thought, “There must be an easier way!” Any how let me and the other visitors know about programs you use that already have this little trick built in because Omnifocus is probably just one of the few.
PS. Would love to put together a list of your most popular productivity programs! (Its probably changed since I last looked)
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