How I use Omnifocus

In an attempt to get my life under control again, I’ve reinstalled Omnifocus, the all-bells-and-whistles to-do app for Mac and iOS. It’s not my first time using it and undoubtedly I will abandon it again at some point, but until that time comes, let me give you an overview of how I use it.

Why Omnifocus?

I won’t claim I have used every to-do app on the market, but the list is long. The other competitors I oscillate between are Things, Apple’s build-in Reminds app and paper. What Omnifocus brings to the table that these others do not have, is the Review feature. I’ll talk more about this in the section about commitments, but I think it’s an essential part of what I want my to-do app to do these days.

The other thing that I just miss when I use a thing like Things, is defer dates, the related “On hold” status and subtasks in parallel and sequential projects. I will come back to these too, but basically: I really like to map out actions for the future, hiding them if they are unavailable, and I want a way for them so show up on my lists when they become available.

Why not Omnifocus?

The above is very advanced and Omnifocus feels really like I’m managing a database. It allows for this very complex setup – which I like – but this also makes me a maximalist user, while still preferring a minimalist workflow.

The other thing is that the app is a bit slow on Mac, and horrendously slow on my old iPhone 11 Pro. The Mac app crashed several times on me now.

The UI of Omnifocus is also not the best. The search function is not of this era, nor are the keyboard shortcuts. Compare it to Things, which is really streamlined and can be navigated fully with only the keyboard, and you get what I mean. If I could put the review stuff in Things, I think I would have the perfect app.

All commitments reviewed

In Omnifocus, every project has a review date. When this date is in the past, it will show up in the dedicated “Review” view, where it is presented with a button next to it. If you click “Reviewed”, it will increase the review date by the interval that you put in the project. This way, I have many projects that I review each week, some each month, but they all can pop into this view on different days of the week, removing a need for a big “weekly review”, which I am terrible at starting with.

As we learn from David Allen in his book Getting Things Done, a project is anything that is on your mind that needs more than one step to completion. He also uses the word “commitments” for this, and I prefer that term, because “projects” to me feels like bundles of tasks. A “commitment” is broader, and could involve goals and standards too.

One of Omnifocus’ many features is the ‘project type’. It can have three types: sequential, which means the tasks have to be done in the order as listed; parallel, which means the tasks can be done in any order and are all available; and single actions, which means this project can never be completed and contains only of actions that do not really have a project. I think the intention of the app is to have one single actions list, but they encourage power users to have multiple if they want to separate, for example, work related and private single actions.

The radical approach I took, is that I made many more single action lists.

For example: I have a commitment that I want to review my work e-mail every workday, and believe me, I need a reminder for that because hardly any human ever e-mails me – but those humans still expect me to answer within a reasonable time.

In previous iterations, I would’ve made a recurring task “check work mail”. The trouble with that is that single actions do not get a review, only their single actions list gets. But having a bunch of random actions on a single list makes the review of it a hassle: it breaks the focus of “one item at a time” and makes me have to think about multiple facets at once. Apart from that: I might want different review-intervals for the different types of commitments that are in there.

To put it another way: if I have the recurring task “check work mail”, a review would nudge me into the question “did you check your work mail?”. The question I want to ask myself during a review is, however: “are you still committed to checking your work mail every work day?”

So my solution is to create a single actions project, with only one (recurring) task on it. I do not see this as a list of actions: I see this as a “commitment”. The title is “being up to date with my work email” (but in Dutch) and the note box contains the following:

it looks a bit silly if people send me an email and I reply only three days later

let it be known to my direct team that I prefer Slack for communication

This clarifies what I mean with this commitment. The review is not about whether or not I have checked my e-mail, it is about reading this text and thinking what checking my e-mail means to me, on a regular basis. (This specific one is set to “review every 1 month” because I don’t think my relation to this topic changes every week.)

The ‘Commitments’ perspective

I’ve did a quick count and 81 of my 126 projects are of this type: a single action project with long and clear title and note describing the commitment they represent. Because there are this many, I used folders to organise them roughly into area’s.

Some other commitments are shorter lived and can actually be completed: those are the other projects and they are of types sequential or parallel, depending on how I wanted to structure them.

To get a quick view of all my commitments, I’ve created a custom perspective in Omnifocus. Perspectives are views that you can customize with filters and options. This one is called “Commitments” and has a green lock as icon. It’s organized as “entire projects”, grouped by “folder” and sorted in “projects order”. Then the contents are defined as:

All of the following:
    Availability: Remaining
    Is a project
    Has a project that is active
    None of the following:
        Contained within project or folder: mensen

That last rule is because I had the idea of adding people I know as these projects, so that I can be reminded of them at regular intervals, to see if I’m up to date with correspondence and to judge if I shouldn’t propose to meet up soon. I haven’t put that many people in so far – it feels like an anti-social thing – but I still like the idea.

The ‘Waiting’ perspective

As I said: Omnifocus has the “On hold” status. One of the very good bits of David Allen’s methodology is to keep a “waiting for” list, and put on it anything you are waiting for. This gets these things out of your mind. In Omnifocus, you can implement this using the “On hold” status.

Projects can have this status. This means that the project is currently not active and that you are not currently committed to complete it – you just like having it around for the future. Tags can also have this status, and if you tag a task with a tag that has this status, the task itself become unavailable. The most common tag to use this on is the “waiting” tag. (I personally also have a “delegated” tag, but it’s currently empty.)

A pattern I use all the time is to set up a sequential project and give it two tasks: one that I want to do, but first the condition I want to have true before I do that. For example: I bought two tickets for a running event by accident, but I am not 100% sure which of the two distances I want to run, so I am holding off on reselling one of tickets. My project for this looks like this:

- "sell ticket for The Run: 10 km or 21 km" (+ due date)
    - ">> if I am sure I can run 21 km" (tag: waiting)
    - "put The Run 10 km ticket for sale" (tag: everywhere)

The “>>” is a leftover from when I used Things, which does not have this status, but I still like to use it because it makes it very clear to me that this action is in fact not an action but a question of sorts. Because the project itself is set to sequential, the last action is actually also not available and will not show up in my “Do” perspective. Only when I check off the waiting task it will pop up there.

I use this in combination with the defer date: I defer the task to a date that I think I will be ready on to make this decision. (In this case: three weeks before the event.) I have the review date of this project on weekly, because I want to be reminded of the fact that I got this covered – no need to stress about it, brain!

To keep track of all these waiting things, I have a perspective called “Waiting”. This shows me all the things that I’m waiting on with a defer date in the past, so that I know to review them. In the “Meta” project I have an action tagged with the “Review” tag (more on that soon) to check this perspective every day.

This perspective is organized as “Individual actions”, grouped by “Defer date”, sorted by “Defer date”, with the following contents:

All of the following:
    Availability: Remaining
    Any of the following:
        Has a defer date in the past 1 year
        All of the following:
            Any of the following:
                Matches search terms: ">>"
                Tagged with any of: "waiting", "delegated"
                All of the following:
                    In the inbox
                    Has a defer date
                Any of the following:
                    Has a defer date in the past 1 year
                    None of the following:
                        Has a defer date

It’s a bit of a mouth full, but it gives me a nice list of other things that have a defer date in the past as well. Most of the times I just clear the defer date if it’s an action that I must take but can’t do right away. After all: it will be available in the “Do” perspective.

“Review”, “morning” and other tags

Like I said: I have a “Meta” project that gives me a few checkboxes to make sure certain lists are empty. These tasks have the tag “review”. This is the very first tag in my tags list, and by doing so these items will end up on top of my “Do” perspective.

Right after that is my “morning” tag, which I use for a little checklist of things I want to do in the morning. This includes “breakfast” (yes), but also more irregular things like remembering to bring the keys for the shop where I run RPGs on Tuesday evenings. I have a task somewhere that reminds me weekly to look at my scheduled runs to see if I need to add “bring running gear to office” tasks here. My mornings are just so much less stressful if I make these decisions in advance, and not with morning-brain.

My tags actually all start with an emoji – with an exception for most location and item based tags. This adds color to them, which works great when scanning the list of things I need to do. Also, they are Dutch, like most of the system – except for the UI, because Omnifocus if you’re reading, your Dutch translation is not great.

I currently have the following:

“🌞 ochtend” - the morning tag
“👀 review” - the review tag
“🗺️ overal” - for things I can always do, or only requiring a phone
“💻 laptop” - self explanatory
“⌨️ code” - technically a subsection of “laptop”, but I like this because the mindset is so different
“📱 contact” - for text messages I put off – again: mindset
“🕵️ verdiepen” - for things that need deeper attention or research
“🏡 thuis” - for those household things
“👔 kantoor” - yet I do not wear a tie at the office
“🚲 onderweg” - this is for errands I can do in the local area, and it has a lot of subtags for certain stores.
“🚂 elders” - for this one I only use the subtasks: cities that are not Amsterdam, some containing tags for more specific locations, but I must admit that these are a bit overkill
“🍵 ontspanning“ - this is for the dumping ground of Youtube links and series to watch that I probably should get rid of
“☎️ bellen” - classic GTD context which I dread and never use
“📦 wat?” - this contains a few subtags with specific items that I need to have in order to complete a task. I sort of create these on the fly when I need them, but it’s useful because it creates a separate category in my “Do” perspective that I can ignore after deciding the item is not currently with me
“👥 wie?” - contains tags for people, but I rarely use them. Also contains the “📂 weekly” tag, which refers to our weekly work meeting, and that one I use to track to report on what I did last week
“👜 mee naar...” - I have this one still as a context for things to bring to another location, but honestly, the morning tag is just a better place to put these things nowadays
“🕶️ gedelegeerd“ (on hold) - I told you about this one
“⏳ wachten“ (on hold) - I told you about this one too

All the perspectives

I’ll conclude with a list of all the perspectives I have in my little side-bar, in this order:

Inbox - and no, it’s hasn’t been empty in a while now
Doen - the “Do” context, only active items without the “ontspanning”, “wie”, “onderweg” and “elders” tags and descendants, actions grouped by tags
Onderweg - similar, but only with “onderweg” and “elders”
Ontspanning - you guessed it
Agenda’s - this is for “wie”, I like these four because they feel like a good high level separation of the tags
Commitments - see above for the description of this
Forecast - a build-in one that I sometimes check, gives an overview of tasks by date
Projects - this one shows as many as possible, because “Commitments” already filters by active status
Tags - also build-in, for managing the tags I guess
Review - very important and the main feature. I have the sidebar hidden here for more focus
Misschien - Basically “Commitments” but only the commitments that are on hold
Wachten - see above
Ongetagd - for all actions without a tag, for when I forget to tag items
Actieloos - for sequential and parallel projects that do not have a next action

Final words

Will I stay in Omnifocus? I don’t know. The usual trajectory is that after a few weeks of overflowing inbox I will do stuff in my head again. Or I will convince myself that my procrastination problem is really just a problem with Omnifocus’ UI – the lack of opinion it has – and I’ll start yet again on working on my own to-do app (I should not).

For now I can say that this is what is in my Omnifocus, and that I have been using it every day for over a month now. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.