Last week I advised you to keep it simple, I advised you to begin with only 3 contexts, @Home, @Errand and @Office. I also suggested that you to put everything in the Someday-Maybe list, because if you are not acting, those tasks are already someday/maybe. I said all this because we need to make an effort to reduce the noise in our systems. I remember how nice the FM radio sounded back the old days. The difference was simple: FM then had no static. The same is true for your system, if you reduce the static, you will move faster, with less drag, and will be able to accomplish more of what you want to accomplish.And that last part is the key: Accomplish more of what you want to Accomplish.
When people begin having productivity systems that allow them to move faster and more efficiently, they discover that they can do more, and they push their system until they break it. They’ve become highly efficient, but are in the same place they were before they had their system:with a set of stuff that is like static noise, useless and annoying. In all the systems I have had the honor to see and peek in, I have found that systems are cluttered with tasks that are no longer relevant, (hey my system is sometimes full of these, too) and that clutter generates an unnecessary noise that make us want to quit the system.
To avoid the clutter and noise, it’s important to know what you want, and that’s part of the reason the project list is so important. Today I’ll cover the Project View. I think you should be able to keep your contexts in a minimal way for another week and make the biggest effort to avoid the static on your system and in your lists.
I should also clarify that this is not an advanced or intermediate view of Projects. This is a beginner view of Projects, and over time, we will be learning more and more. The idea of this week is to give you some basic tools so you can continue learning.
What it is a project? In “Getting Things Done,” David Allen defines a project as: “any commitment that takes more than one step to complete.”
So basically anything is a project. On installation, Omnifocus gives you 3 kinds of projects and four ways to classify project status.
Let’s begin with the kinds of projects.
- The Sequential Project: This is the kind of project that you will use, when steps must be taken in sequence or in a particular order one after the other. For example, to send a document to someone, you might be waiting for the original, signed document to arrive.
- The Parallel Project: In this sort of project, actions can happen concurrently or in any sort of sequence. For example, you might be doing the final corrections on the file, but can also looking into printing options.
- The Single Action List: Omnifocus recognizes that there are things that are not technically projects, but more a list of actions. For example, moving the trash out to the curb on Sundays for Monday pickup.
Omnifocus projects (especially long ones) can begin as sequential and then move to parallel, and back to sequential.
Now let’s take a look the project status.
- Active: These are the projects that you are currently working on.
- On Hold (Waiting): When marked as on hold, the actions in a project are no longer considered available. Omnifocus grays out the project name and all it’s actions when a project is put “on hold.”
- Completed: You get to enjoy marking projects as complete when you decide that the project is done and no more actions are needed.
- Dropped: Rather than simply delete projects that are no longer relevant, Omnifocus gives you the option to mark these are “dropped.” All the information about that project is still stored in the system in case you want to retrieve it later.
Finally, Omnifocus allow you to organize your project in Folders, which can be useful, but because we are looking to begin this system in a simple way, we are going to skip organizing your projects in folders for now.
For the next week or two, we are going to concentrate ourselves in the Project Perspective. Omnifocus, use the word Perspective instead of View, that I understand confuse people, so understand that the Perspective of Project is just a View of the Projects.
The next step is simple: begin populating all those projects that are relevant, that you are working on, that are active. Everything else should be kept in the Someday/Maybe, as we said.
After you list your Projects, make sure you use that you use the note function on the project and add the successful outcome.
The Successful outcome is basically what will mean for you to be done, or to remove it from your list, how it will be fantastic, it will be incredible.
After you populate your Successful Outcome, begin with the actions, remember if possible to keep the context to a minimum and as simple as possible.
Next Week we will cover more advance stuff in the Project side and then we will begin to cover the Contexts and how to use it as effective as possible. In the mean time, have fun, creating your Project list and the basic actions. Over time, we will teach you what to do with Everything, and how to trow anything to your system and continue going were you want to go.
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