OmniFocus: GTD-based Productivity

If you are looking to “get things done” on your Mac, you have plenty of choice when it comes to applications to aid you. Everything from a very minimal to-do list applications like Anxiety, to full blown GTD-based applications like OmniFocus, the application I want to talk about today.

If you are familiar with the GTD concept by David Allen, you will feel right at home with OmniFocus. If you’re not, OmniFocus has a few included actions that will help you get acquainted.

When you first open OmniFocus, you are greeted with the actions that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Before we get into using OmniFocus though, I would like to talk a bit about the philosophy behind this app.

First off, OmniFocus’ methodology was based off of David Allen’s popular GTD book “Getting Things Done,” though if you are not familiar with the book, it will not hinder you from understanding this application. The three concepts that you need to know when beginning to use OmniFocus are:

1. Action: something you can physically do in one step.
2. Project: any task that takes more than one physical action. In other words, a goal that requires more than one action to reach.
3. Context: physical requirement for an action (e.g. place, object, activity, person).

OmniFocus is set up to follow a 3-step process: Capture, Organize, Do. It is recommended that you first perform a “brain dump” and allow OmniFocus to capture all of your current tasks in the Inbox. Once you have added all of the things you want to do, you can organize them, and then (hopefully) do those tasks.

Alright, so now onto the meat of this post, which will be focused on how to use OmniFocus. If you go into the Inbox, you will be greeted with a blank screen, as there hasn’t been any items entered into OmniFocus yet. Clicking on the “Add Action” button will get you started with a new action. Tapping “enter” while an action is selected will create a new action below the active one; tapping “tab” will cycle horizontally through the options available for each action (Project, Context etc.). You can add actions on the fly (when you aren’t in OmniFocus) buy holding “ctrl+option+Space,” which will bring up the quick entry window.

For each action, there is much more information that you can optionally add to your actions like a start date, due date, repeat the action etc.

Once you have a list of actions going, it is time to organize them. Any actions that require more than one step should be made into projects. You can create a project by dragging an action into your library, or by clicking the “+” in the bottom-left corner of the window. Just like with actions, you can use the Inspector to add more information about your project to OmniFocus, such as status, start date, due date etc.

In terms of viewing your project, clicking on it’s name in the sidebar will show all of the actions associated with it. Clicking on “Focus” in the toolbar will hide all other projects except for the one currently selected. You can choose whether the tasks need to be done sequentially, or non-sequentially in the inspector, or by clicking on the arrows in the project’s name at the top of the window. You can re-order actions by dragging and dropping them. Clicking “View” in the toolbar drops down a little bar that allows you to filter your actions based on certain criteria. Once you have your actions organized into projects, you need to assign contexts to them.

Contexts, like I said before, are the physical requirements for actions. In other words, the category in which the action falls (e.g. Errands, Mac, Phone). OmniFocus comes with a few contexts already, and it is simple to add your own. To add a context to an action, click in the column to the right of its title, and type the name of the context. Contexts you already have entered will show up as you type (demonstrated in the screenshot above), making it quick to find the context you are looking for. Once you’ve assigned contexts to your actions, you can really begin to take advantage of what OmniFocus has to offer.

In the top-left corner of the window, under the close/minimize buttons, there are mode buttons. You can choose to have the window display in “Planning” or “Context” mode. Going into context mode allows you to view all of the actions for a certain context. For example, if you are sitting with your Mac and have access to the internet, you can see all of your actions that are under the “Mac: Online” context, or if you are going to run some errands, you can see all of the actions that you tagged as such.

In the “Context” mode you can also re-arrange your contexts, according to your preferences. You can group contexts together by dragging their names onto each other, which allows you to see multiple, related contexts at once.

When you want to check an item off your list, you just click in the checkbox to the left of the action; clicking “Clean Up” will remove all completed items from the project. If you ever want to see your completed items again, clicking “Perspectives>All Items” in the menubar will show you just that. To learn more about Perspectives, I suggest you watch this video by the OmniGroup.

Basically, once you get a hand of OmniFocus’ workflow, you can refine it to fit your needs. For many, a simple to-do app like Anxiety or Apple’s iCal is plenty for day to day tasks; but for those who need a more powerful application to manage all of their activities, OmniFocus does a great job of balancing ease-of-use with the GTD concept.

Choosing a GTD application can be a daunting task, as everyone has a different way they like to manage their to-do list, which means that every application will feel different to each individual. I suggest giving all the competition a test-drive before deciding which one is right for you.

OmniFocus is $79.95 (educational and family discounts available) from the OmniGroup.