*** Thanks for the comments. I miss two important details in this post, and thanks to the feedback I decide to add them to leave a complete post. The 2 updates are at the bottom as well as in the part they should have been. Thanks again!
Keeping your system simple is the key, and I cannot emphasize this enough. The key to a functioning system is not in having more than you need, and for sure is not in having less than you need, but in having enough of what you need so you can move fast.
This week, we will be covering a little more on the project perspective (view) of OmniFocus. I was originally planning to cover the Context Perspective this week, but after further consideration, we will wait until the next week to cover that. Again, keep it simple, you will survive one more week.
I want to begin with were I finished last week: The Successful Outcome. This is one of those things that you may be sure you already understand, and because you think you already know it, you skip out on defining the successful outcome of most projects. Often, people who skip this step are busy and feel they don’t have time to “waste,” especially on something they think they’ll remember. If this is you, then you’re lying to yourself. Albert Einstein famously said: “If I had twenty days to solve a problem, I would take nineteen days to define it.” The problem is you are going too fast to define what it is you’re attempting to get done.
Lewis Carroll in ‘Alice in Wonderland wrote: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there” That’s the problem of not defining a clear outcome, not setting aside the moment or moments to define what you need to get there, to make sure that you take the best road possible.
Let’s embark some fun stuff with Projects. Take a look at the screenshot on the right, and you have never seen this window, please stop reading, open OmniFocus. and create a project (or open one of your existent ones) and click on the ‘Inspector Button.’ You’ll find it on the upper right of any window.
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(Update 1) One of our readers, mention, that in reality the first thing you see is not the part that mention Type, Status and Context but this one.
The first thing you will see is a series of four icons. When you hover your cursor over each one, you’ll see their names appearing in the bar at the top of the window, to the right of the triangle that allows you to expand and minimize the Inspector window. From left to right, these icons are Action, Group, Project, and Context. For today’s post, you’ll want to choose the Project icon.
The next thing you’ll see is the Type of project, which we covered last week: Sequential, Parallel and Single Action. To change a project from one type to another, you can simply click on the appropriate Type. Next you will see Status, which you may also change here:Active, On Hold (Waiting), Completed and Dropped. If you want to learn more about each one of these types, please see last week’s post.
Below Type is a drop-down menu for Context. For now, I recommend that you keep this simple and limit yourself to 3 contexts: @Home, @Errands, and @Office. From the Inspector, you may only choose pre-defined contexts.
OmniFocus allows you to define a default context for your projects. For example, you may selected as a default that all the actions on a particular project are “@Office,” and OmniFocus will populate the context automatically of any action in that project as “@Office.” If some action does not belong in your default context, you can change it manually. I don’t use default contexts very often, because I believe you should not automate the thinking process; taking those seconds to think about the context tends to make a great difference for me.
(Update 2:) I forgot to explain how to select the ‘Default’ context, even that I talk about it, I didn’t explain how to make this default Context.
In the drop-down Menu that said ‘Context’ select the one you want to be the ‘Default’, you wish to use for this specific project.
Below the Context drop-down is a checkbox: “Mark complete when completing last item.” This is something I use constantly; there are many projects on my list that reach a point in which the project can be mark as complete automatically. For example, when I order something online, I will create a project and select this checkbox. . I recently got a present for my wife, and after the Waiting For item (which indicated the item was ordered and in route to me), was another action: Wrap present for my wife. After the item was received and the gift was wrapped, I didn’t need the project anymore,and in completing the last action, the project was automatically marked complete.
The next section in the window allows you to define timeframes of your project: when the project will start and when the project is due, as well as when it was completed. OmniFocus will fill the Completed date automatically when you the project is marked complete.
Start: The Start date of a project is to be used when you have planned the whole project or the beginning steps of it, but do not want the project or its contents to show in your Context Perspectives (Views) yet. For example, you want to order a gift for someone, but you don’t want to order the item until next Friday after you get paid. You can create the project, and list its actions but put the ‘Start’ date as next Friday, so nothing in the project shows in your system until that date.
Due: This is the date that this project will be due. I don’t tend to use due date for projects, but understand that if you select a due date, all the actions that are not finished in the project will come due on that day, and display in your system. In the future, we will talk more about due dates, but my recommendation for now is to avoid them, unless that due date is truly necessary.
The next section of the Inspector window, is the repeat section.
OmniFocus allows you to set a project to be repeated at various intervals, you set a project as Repeat every, Start again or Due Again.
Repeat every: This is used for projects that are repeated after X number of days, weeks, months or years. This allows some automation, if you are looking for that, so you can create a project that repeats every year to buy flowers for your wife for her birthday, for instance.
Start again: This is use to restart a project after completion. For example, if you need to send your accountant your monthly expenses for your company, you can create a project that contain all the steps required to do that, and set it to Start Again every X amount of days or weeks.
Due again: This is used to set a project due date at a certain interval. For example, you know that you need to submit your expenses before Wednesday to be paid on Friday. You can set this project to be due every Wednesday morning, since after that day, it’s going to be irrelevant until the following week.
Finally, at the bottom of the Inspector window is a review section which we are not going to cover today. We will get it at a later time, when we begin working with the review of your projects.
Next week we will begin working with Contexts, and it’s going to be fun. I hope that these posts, have allowed you to get a better understanding of what it’s possible with Projects in OmniFocus.
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Update:
One of our readers, mention, that in reality the first thing you see is not the part that mention Type, Status and Context but this one.
This is the first thing you see in the Inspector Window, for this post, we should be in the third button, the Project one. The Others in Order are: Action, Group, Project and Context. We will get later on into more detail of these ones.
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Update 2:
I forgot to explain how to select the ‘Default’ context, even that I talk about it, I didn’t explain how to make this default Context.
In the drop-down Menu that said ‘Context’ select the one you want to be the ‘Default’, you wish to use for this specific project.
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