Uncommon Ground

Getting organized in 2018 – Getting things done

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series

Previous posts in this series have outlined how I combine pen and paper with OmniFocus, Evernote, and Dropbox to keep myself organized, but they didn’t describe how they all fit together. I also didn’t mention that years ago when everything was in my paper DayTimer I had already stumbled on one of the principles that David Allen preaches in Getting Things Done:

Capture what has your attention

Capture what has your attention (from gettingthingsdone.com)

Everything I need to do gets into OmniFocus. Once it’s there, it either gets done or I decide that it doesn’t need to get done, but I don’t have to think about it any more. My weekly review will remind me that it’s there until its either done or deleted. I include links to Evernote or Dropbox when necessary.

When I receive an e-mail that needs attention later, I forward it to OmniFocus. Once it’s there, it’s a task I have to deal with. I don’t like seeing red overdue tasks, so sending the e-mails to OmniFocus accomplishes two things:

  1. It helps me keep my e-mail inbox clean. I move e-mails I forward to OmniFocus into a follow up folder in Outlook (named @Follow-Up so it’s near the top of the folder list). OmniFocus contains all the details I need to be reminded of, but having the original e-mail handy means that it’s easy to reply when I need to.
  2. It ensures that I take an action on the e-mail. My first action is simply to get it into OmniFocus. My next action is triggered when I see it in my OmniFocus inbox and its moved to its final destination in OmniFocus.1 Once an item gets to its final destination, it’s in a project that gets reviewed regularly. I often assign items a due date when I putting them into a project. I hate seeing red bubbles on the app, whether on iPhone, iPad, MacBook, or iMac, so I either complete the task, reschedule it to a later date,2 or give up and decide to drop the task (meaning that I delete it from OmniFocus).

The same principle works with my Everything notebook. Usually at the end of the day I will review my Everything notebook to identify tasks that need to go into OmniFocus. Those tasks may have arisen as action items from meetings, or they may be thoughts that occurred to me when it was easier to jot them down than enter them in OmniFocus. Whatever the reason, the tasks get into OmniFocus, and I forget about them – because OmniFocus won’t, and it will remind me.

My weekly review is pretty simple. Every Sunday:

  • I empty my OmniFocus inbox by moving items to the project where they belong.
  • I review my calendar for the week and add any tasks related to meetings or events for the week.
  • I use the “Review” function in OmniFocus to review all of the tasks I’ve entered. For each task I decide whether I need to change the timing or drop it completely. Since I’ve grouped tasks into large projects and then used folders within the projects to group related tasks, it’s pretty easy to see where every task fits even though I probably have a few hundred tasks in my list at any one time.

Every morning I take a quick look at the list of tasks for that day and the overdue tasks that should have been done. For an overdue task, I decide whether to change the due date, continue to feel (increasingly) guilty about not getting it done in the hopes that I will get it done soon, or drop it because it is no longer important enough to worry about. For a task that isn’t overdue, I don’t have to worry about feeling guilty (yet), but I still sometimes I decide to postpone it if the day looks busier than I anticipated on Sunday (or if completing overdue task is more important).

  1. Emptying my OmniFocus inbox is part of my weekly review, but I sometimes check it during the week.
  2. For which I always feel guilty. The version of OmniFocus for laptop or desktop records the date when an item was created, which reminds me when I originally intended to finish. The guilt builds as the distance between what I originally intended and where I am grows.

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