An Introduction to Getting Things Done®
- Learn how to use OmniFocus with Getting Things Done to, well get things done!Learn more about OmniFocus at more aboou.
- The program OmniFocus is one of the best (and most complex) task management applications for Mac (not available on Windows). Here, you’ll find links to all our articles and tutorials about how to use OmniFocus to increase your productivity and manage your time. Full list of Omnifocus articles, tutorials and screencasts Simple Task Management.
- Inside Omnifocus An Introduction to Getting Things Done® Developed by David Allen and published in a bestselling book of the same name, Getting Things Done® became a compelling system for dealing with anything. Tasks around the house, career goals, things to buy—anything you can turn into a command to follow or action to do.
- If you’re using OmniFocus on an iOS device with Siri (iPhone 4S and later, iPad 3rd generation and later, iPad Pro, all iPad Minis, and iPod Touch 5th generation and later), all you need to do is check a few settings on your device and you can start adding spoken items to your Inbox in no time.
BLUF: Stay focused and avoid the distraction of technology throughout the week by using OmniFocus’s Forecast perspective in your weekly review to enter appointments and tasks for your upcoming week into your Full Focus Planner. Increasingly, the productivity world is rightly arguing that, as great as technology is at solving certain problems and allowing us a greater sense of mobility, it.
Developed by David Allen and published in a bestselling book of the same name, Getting Things Done® became a compelling system for dealing with anything. Tasks around the house, career goals, things to buy—anything you can turn into a command to follow or action to do.
It was originally designed without a software component in mind—manila folders, actually! GTD® is a great system, but with OmniFocus, it can be even better.
You can also read the original GTD Whitepaper.
Capture
Getting Things Done® starts with the concept of an Inbox—a temporary holding area to get any idea or task out of your mind so you don’t forget it. Oh, I need to schedule a checkup with a doctor. Put it in the inbox. I need to remind my kid to take the garbage out on Fridays. Put it in the inbox. I’d like to build a sailboat next year. Put it in the inbox—even though it’s a huge project that you probably don’t even know how to start.
David Allen advises GTDers to do a brain dump: spend 20 to 30 minutes going through all aspects of your life, putting down anything that you need to work out in the future. Do it. It works. You’ll hit a groove after 5 minutes and end up with a pretty large collection.
Process
Processing your Inbox is important—take time to do it right. With each item you wrote down, take a second to think about a few things:
- What is it?
- Is it a project in and of itself?
- Is it a simple action that could go in a “Miscellaneous” project?
- Does it require a due date?
- What do I need available to do it?
Take “Build a sailboat next year” as an example. Even if it’s just a model, there are at least a few steps required to make your goal. For kicks, we could probably start with “google ‘how to build a sailboat.’” Turning it into a project means “Build a sailboat next year” is the end goal, and you’ll have invidivual, doable steps along the way.
One other thing to consider: can you do it, or does it require someone elses action? If someone else: delegate it. Send them an email right then, or create an action to “Email Brian about this one thing.”
Read more about delegation—there are many different approaches.
And then we have dates: defer dates and due dates. Dates aren’t a requirement; but dates help ensure that actions don’t fall through the cracks or beg for your attention when they don’t need it. Hooking up a defer date to an action says “I’ll hide from sight until this date.”
Which brings us to the concept of a context. A context is the tool, resource, or location—whatever is required—to get the task done. These are super-useful when combined with other features in OmniFocus, so it’s worth spending some time on them at the start.
Where do we research how to build a sailboat? Let’s try The Internet. You might be connected to the internet all day at work, but this isn’t related to work; you can make it really specific, like “Home iMac.” Some keep it simple, like iMac. And once you know which way works best, you can optimize from there.
It’s pretty common to use a spouse or a colleague as a context that you often interact with. It may seem odd to check off “Ask about moving the garden to make space for a beehive,” but you won’t forget to ask.
Processing becomes a natural habit after a while. There aren’t hard and fast rules for it, but it makes sense to clean your Inbox out regularly. Some people do it multiple times a day, others in their weekly review (we’ll get to reviews later). You’ll quickly figure out how frequently you need to clear it out, though.
- Consider separating different areas of your life. Work and Personal, nay, list Personal first, should be separated. Some features, like Focus, are even better with this first distinction.
- If you don’t know the next step or timeline for an item, defer it. Still not sure how to get started on a project? Create a project, set a start date in the future, and forget about it for awhile. Think it over during a review.
- Will it take less than 2 minutes? Is it possible right now? Just do it! Don’t put a due date on it, don’t put it in a single-action list. Just do it.
Organize
Organizing is all about making sure each bit is in the right spot. Too much fiddling is a problem, but not having pieces in the right spot is even more hazardous. Organizing is sort of like processing—if something isn’t working for you, change it.
Do
Doing is easy! You just start checking things off because the capture, process, and organize phases went smoothly. Let’s assume it did, anyway.
Here’s where we combine all the good stuff from those earlier phases to do things without having to worry about anything other than the task at hand.
Review
Reviewing is a key facet of GTD® that keeps everything going smoothly. In short, we’re periodically looking over projects and making some considerations.
The GTD Weekly Review® is just that: weekly. And it should do three big things:
- Get Clear
Did your desk get physically full over the past week? Clear it out. Scan in new items or type in notes so that you can file all of that clutter away. - Get your Inbox to zero
Now that you’ve just added to your Inbox, process it. - Empty your head
Anything else that needs to come out? Take the time to do a brain dump, like we did at the beginning, to make room for the next week.
Then, we’ll get current. To get current, review each project and action list. Consider these questions.
- Do I need to add a new first step?
Is the first action action-able enough? - Does this project represent your goals?
Should I still be worrying about it, or should I drop it? - Does the metadata represent what you want?
Could you defer it? Should you set a flag for higher priority? - Are my Waiting-For lists actionable yet?
Has anyone emailed you? Should you check back on an unanswered email?
Finally, take some time to be creative. Are there any big projects on hold that you could bring up from the minors? Is there anything you’re afraid to pull out of you brain and put down on “paper?” Get it out and consider a first action.
Remember: a review is not simply clearing the dots next to each project. If something is staring back with 30 seconds of thinking versus a 1/2 second of deferring until later, spend the 30 seconds thinking of a next action or “defer until” date.
Getting Things Done & OmniFocus 2
Here’s the specific stuff. OmniFocus is the best way to implement GTD on Mac and iOS.
Capturing in OmniFocus
The Inbox
The Inbox is where capture happens. Anything can go here: the more you enter, the less you’ll forget. You can type directly in the OmniFocus Inbox; hitting return twice after each new title will create another.
But you can also bring in text from other Mac apps. You’ll want to set up a keyboard shortcut for Clippings, which you can learn more about here.
Since many requests happen via email, a lot of mail clients include integration with many task management systems. This makes sending an action to OmniFocus—along with a link back to the original message—just a keystroke away. You can set this up for Mail.app with our Clip-o-Tron installer. For 3rd-party clients, check out MailMate or Postbox; we have a lot more listed on our email page here at Inside OmniFocus. If you’re not on a Mac most of the time—or use a web-based email client—check out Mail Drop! You can forward or send an email straight to your OmniFocus Inbox.
Finally, we have Quick Entry. This is a small window that can be called from anywhere in OS X—even in full screen apps. Just hit the keyboard shortcut you’ve assigned in OmniFocus Preferences, enter your tasks, and hit return.
Just get all of your tasks, ideas, and “stuff” into the Inbox. It doesn’t yet need to be a full thought yet—just get it in there.
Reviews
Reviews are an important part of GTD®, and they’re easy in OmniFocus 2. First, just know that each project has each of these:
- a review interval (how often you want a project to “pop up” in Review mode)
- last-reviewed date (the last time you hit the “Mark Reviewed” button)
- and Next Review date. (the next time it’ll be ready for Review)
All projects that are waiting for review are listed in the left sidebar.
Until you’ve reviewed a project, a maroon dot will be right next to it. When you leave Review mode and come back, the sidebar will be “cleaned up” to only show the non-reviewed projects.
Take this Review Bar:
The Up and Down arrows move you between listed projects in the sidebar.The basic metadata for each review session is listed here.The last bit, “Mark Reviewed,” does just that. Press this button (or hit Command-Shift-R) after you’ve carefully considered the project. And consider these things about GTD® Review that were mentioned earlier.
Forecast
Get a grip on the upcoming week and month with two facets—the mini calendar to the left that shows a quick idea of Big Days, and to the right, which shows the currently selected blocks of time in the minicalendar.
The Forecast view isn’t explicity GTD-oriented, though—we just collect another aspect of your life in one spot so things don’t slip through the cracks. You’ll always have hard-landscape tasks to do, and that’s why we have the calendar; knowing if you have time to do Task X before—oh, you’ve got a meeting at 4—is useful! You get a quick look at your day without heading into another app.
You can toggle specific calendars by using the View Popover in the toolbar.
And let’s say it’s the end of the day on Thursday, but you still have a few more things to do for the week. In the Forecast view, you can drag from 1 day to another—using the minicalendar—to reschedule, or modify the Due Date. Holding down the Command key will instead modify the Defer Date. Holding down both the Command and Option key will change both.
Custom Perspectives (Pro)
Perspectives in OmniFocus can mean a few things. They can be default views slightly modified; they can be completely customized based on folders, projects, and contexts; they can exist solely around dates. Add perspectives to the sidebar, open them in new windows, etc.
First, let’s try to define it a bit more. A perspective is any view that has specificity in any way. You can save it to reference it again later, and a lot of users perspective-fiends build their entire workflow around them. Take a look at Kourosh’s workflow. As a very basic example, we could use one of the biggest OmniFocus features, “Focus,” to create a simple perspective that excludes everything outside of work.
“Work” can mean one of two things:- Any context that is related to work- Any project that is explicitly related to work
Delegation
- A better delegation script by Jered Benoit
- Set up a Waiting For Perspective by purplezengoat.
- Managing Work Tasks by Tim Metz @ Omni Blog.
Listening
- Intro to GTDandthefollowingepisodes on the Back to Work podcast. Merlin Mann & Dan Benjamin.
- Preneurcast 025: Getting Things Done With OmniFocus.
Watching
- Creating Projects & Groups by Learn OmniFocus.
It’s official. I’ve come back to OmniFocus in full force. But after making that decision, I realized that my life is very different from where I was when I was using OmniFocus previously. And that means rethinking the whole structure. So I went on a search for inspiration and came up with a plethora of valuable resources.
Sidenote: I have a video course available that goes through my live system where I explain all the details. You can learn more here.
And for a short time, this is 50% off! You can take advantage of the discount here:
Learn OmniFocus
There’s a lot of great material on the Learn OmniFocus site. Tim Stringer has done a fantastic job of pulling together helpful videos and articles for a variety of use cases in OmniFocus. Thus, the first place I went to was learnomnifocus.com.
Note: This article contains affiliate links. That means that if you click one of these links and subsequently make a purchase, I will earn a commission. You pay nothing extra; any commission I earn comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that I only recommend tools that I find genuinely helpful and useful. I ask that if don’t feel the same way about them, please do not spend any money on these products.
Here, Tim Stringer goes through the process of looking at Horizons 3,4, and 5. At least, that’s my summary. I came away from this video wanting to realize an aspect of my OmniFocus system that I’ve contemplated for a few years now, tying my long-term and short-term goals to projects.
I just love Kourosh Dini’s work. And to have him and Tim together on a screencast makes it awesome. Kourosh has a way of putting together meta projects that link to other projects in OmniFocus. That way we can manage priorities and easily make decisions on what projects come next. It’s this format that I think will play a role in tying the higher horizons to day-to-day work.
There’s one small piece of this screencast with Scotty Jackson that jumped out at me: project codes. I attempted to use project codes a while back, but it didn’t stick. But this inspired a different train of thought. What if I write a TextExpander snippet that creates the code, creates a reference text file, and maintains a list of project codes all in one place? Done. More on that below.
There’s one small tip I found here and that’s the use of a single actions list as a separator line in the projects list. When I saw this, I immediately went to OmniFocus and plugged in a couple of them.
OmniFocus Field Guide
My good friend David Sparks has an excellent primer on OmniFocus in his Field Guide. In particular, he has a lecture going through his personal system. He opens his real database and walks you through as much as he can. Having done several screencasts, I can tell you that this is quite a feat and one to be admired.
But the main thing I took away from David’s Field Guide is that I need a single project in OmniFocus that helps guide me through the day. I mentioned this earlier but it was solidified when going through these videos. A single project with references elsewhere can be immensely helpful.
Another point about David’s system, he used to be a huge advocate for using Defer Dates heavily. This is something I’ve resonated with while going through all these systems. It just makes sense to decide when you’re going to do something and not rely on my willpower to decide on a context to work within.
Using OmniFocus
Where do I start with this one? Kourosh Dini has a lot of excellent material on OmniFocus, but it’s deeper than that. I’ve been through his book and read every article on his site. It’s hard for me to nail down the exact tips and mindsets he’s helped me with, but I do know that almost all of it involves intention setting and building habits. That’s the part I want to focus on, habits.
I know that it’s easy to drop things into OmniFocus and tag it endlessly. But if I ignore tags altogether and focus on projects while building habits that bring all of my projects into focus throughout a normal week, I know I’ll be making true progress towards my mission of helping people with technology. Thank you for showing me the importance of this, Kourosh.
Omni Forums
I check in on the OmniFocus Forums pretty regularly anymore. I haven’t made big alterations to my system based on any posts there, but I do pick up some quick tips and ideas regularly. A couple of those posts I’ve keyed in on recently:
And sometimes I have questions about how to do something that’s likely not possible.
Around the Web
Using Omnifocus By Joe Buhlig
I run across articles about OmniFocus a lot. I suppose that’s to be expected. And although these don’t always change the way I use the tool, I do find them motivating in one way or another.
This time around, amid my searching, I enjoyed reading these articles:
Miscellaneous
I can’t say there was one location in particular that I found this referenced, by Tim Stringer advocates for putting long-term single action lists in brackets: [Single Actions]. I like that concept but found brackets kind of hard to see on mobile and somewhat challenging to type. Though I’m just being picky. So I adopted the concept but use dashes instead: -Single Actions-.
My New Setup
Project List
After looking at a LOT of setups and reflecting on my own, I realized that this is pretty typical. I’m still particular with the order of these projects and I don’t keep everything in folders, but I do have it spelled out in a decent amount of detail. You’ll see more about how this pans out in the “Schedule” perspective.
Project Codes
Surprise. Surprise. I wrote an AppleScript for this to be used in TextExpander. Here’s how I use it:
- Go to the title line of a new project in OmniFocus.
- Type in
pcode.new. - Enter the name of the project.
- Done
When I do that, it adds a line to my project-codes.md file with the code and new of the new project like this: [[2019-0001 | My New Project]]. It also creates a new text file dedicated to that project: 2019-0001 | My New Project.md. And finally, it returns that text for the snippet result.
The double brackets in the code file mean I can keep these notes in nvUltra and treat my master code file as a list of hyperlinks to all my reference notes on my projects.
Could I use the notes field in OmniFocus? Yes. Would it make more sense? Likely. But I like the ability to list all of my projects by code and see the history of my projects in one place whether the projects are complete or not.
In the future, I may expand this to creating the OmniFocus project for me and hyperlinking to the notes file from the OmniFocus notes field. But this works for now.
Another potential expansion would be to create a project folder for reference material and link it in the OmniFocus project notes field via Hook or an embedded link to the folder.
No Tags
People tag everything! And it kind of drives me nuts. There are tags for pets, coffee shops, and aspirations galore. It’s all overkill. So I set out to find a way to do this without tags at all. None.
And I found a way to do this. But it’s predicated on two things:
You need a focus on habitual routines. If you have a schedule throughout your week where you know you have time for errands, follow-up, and each Area of Focus, this works beautifully.
You will either need to have review time built-in for scheduling tasks or you need to assign Defer Dates to everything. I opt for a mix of both. If I know when something needs done or know the expectation of when it should be done, I enter that date as the Defer Date. Otherwise, I leave it blank and only add a date when I commit to doing it on a certain day.
What this means is that I no longer try to pick a tag to work in. I’ve dealt with the mess of choosing a context or tag. And I always find myself picking the one I like to do more than the one I need to do. I’m much better off sticking to a single list for the entire day.
And that means I now use Defer Dates as a way to schedule tasks on specific days whether it’s the next couple days or multiple weeks out.
Higher Horizons
This is the piece I wanted to get right. I think I found a great way to do this but need to continue working with it for many months before I can say it’s truly successful.
The way it works is with a single project called “guidance”. And inside that project are three recurring tasks:
- “Work on Horizon 5 tasks”
- “Work on Horizon 4 tasks”
- “Work on Horizon 3 tasks”
Each of those has a link in the notes field that takes me to a perspective for each Horizon. And those three perspectives have a simple setup. They show me all available tasks for a limited number of projects.
That means I select the long-term or short-term projects for each perspective that pertain to each Horizon. And the perspective simply shows me the tasks that point me towards success in each of those realms.
As an example, part of my Horizon 4 goals is to heal from Lyme disease. I have a project under my Health folder called “stabilize lyme disease.” My “horizon4” perspective shows all available tasks for this project and a couple of others. And the “guidance” project gives me a line item in the “Schedule” perspective as an encouragement and reminder to work on these tasks.
The “Schedule” Perspective
This perspective is what pulls everything together. Remember that I keep my list of projects in a very specific order from top to bottom. So the theory is that I roughly start at the top and work my way down the list. That order is predicated on a daily routine of tasks and habits that are designed for long-term success and growth.
Using Omnifocus With Windows
The “Schedule” perspective is simply a one-stop look at my entire day. Here are the settings for it:
It shows me any Available or Remaining task with a Due Date or a Defer Date and groups them by Defer Date. That means I can look at this list and see everything I’ve chosen for today, which is done by setting the Defer Date for that date.
But this also allows me to look at the tasks I failed to accomplish in days past because those will show up at the very top of the perspective. That turns out to be key for me as it is an excellent reminder to hustle and catch up when needed.
Being able to see these lists broken out by date is technically available in the Forecast perspective, but when I check the box to include tasks with a Defer Date, it shows me two lists instead of one. I simply like the cleanliness of this single, duplicate-free list. It also means I don’t have to switch back and forth across perspectives. I can work from my “Schedule” and that’s it. If I follow a link to another perspective and finish that list, I always go back to “Schedule.” There is no remembering where I was. It’s always the same.
Habit Building
I’ve alluded to this throughout this article, but to be more explicit, this entire system is dependent on a commitment to building routines and habits. In the last year, I’ve been forced to learn how to build a truly healthful lifestyle. And that lifestyle is one that requires routines and positive habits. It’s those routines and habits that have allowed me the freedom to be more creative and develop true joy in life. Thus, I’m continuing that commitment by building a task management system that helps me fine-tune those routines and habits.
Motivation
While I was going through these resources and building out this system, I also listened to a podcast by Brett McKay on The Art of Manliness about becoming a Time Warrior. It had a big impact on my way of thinking about tasks and delaying action on them.
The issue comes when deciding what to put into OmniFocus. Historically, I’ve followed the two-minute rule and deferred pretty much everything else. Steve Chandler (interviewed in the show) suggests that taking immediate action on most everything is the better path and the true method for achieving results. Instead of putting “call supplier” on the list, get it done now.
There are all kinds of complaints and arguments against this mentality, but I also have to admit that I know a handful of people who operate this way and it rarely back-fires. Even if it’s a one-hour project, doing it right away typically pays off.
I haven’t nailed down how I want to operate with this in mind, but I do know this, I’m glad I sat down to write this article when the idea struck.