Great post in the OmniFocus forums about creating a better and faster capturing workflow for OmniFocus on iOS (works for iPad and iPhone). It makes use of the OmniFocus URL scheme, which triggers the Quick Entry when you add enter ‘omnifocus:///add’ into Mobile Safari.
Adding in some magic by iShortCuts and you’ll have a one-click-to-capture experience straight from your iPad’s/iPhone’s home screen.
The popular Mac OS X desktop client for GoogleMail, Mailplane, has been updated to v2.5.5 and sports a significantly improved integration with OmniFocus now. Get the latest version of Mailplane and download the OmniFocus plug-in.
The plug-in allows you select text within an email and invoke the OmniFocus quick entry, populated with the selected text in the notes field as well as a link back to the email in Mailplane. Read the installation documentation
In this short screencast I am demonstrating how I use TextExpander inside of OmniFocus to track projects, which I have delegated and where I don’t want to track individual actions.
Basically all these projects are tracked as individual entries in a Single Action List called ‘Delegated Projects’ and I use the note field and TextExpander to capture easy to read status updates. I get these updates either through weekly status calls or meetings I have with the project owners or via email.
Whenever I am asked to provide an update myself or meet anyone associated with the project, I can quickly and easily engage on the subject.
I also use TextExpander to capture single Waiting For actions I record during meetings or calls. TextExpander helps me to reduce the time and the typing required to capture these while I still want to follow and remain engaged in the conversation. Querying my Twitter followers that seems to be the most common use case amongst them as well.
I can definitely confirm the results of this study. Sometimes, unfortunately, for myself, but clearly for a lot of my colleagues and customers.
Stress was directly linked to the number of times people checked their phones on average, and people with the most extreme levels of stress were troubled by “phantom” vibrations when no message had been received, the survey showed.
Simple solutions include turning off notifications for email, text/iMessage, Twitter and IM. You can also configure your email account on your iPhone to not get messages pushed, but only polled on your explicit request. Calms you down significantly and let you be in the moment, e.g. the conversation you are having, the meeting you are in or the dinner you are enjoying with someone who is important to you.
Another fine piece of OmniFocus extension work by Don Southard allowing you to add the current selected file from Finder to your favourite productivity application via your favourite application launcher Alfred. Check out Don’s blog for more helpful Alfred extensions and OmniFocus hacks.
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Robin Francis Trew, aka RobTrew well known AppleScript guru in the OmniFocus forum, has released this little application that provides you with detail statistics about what lives in your OmniFocus database. It won’t help you the get any work done or make the world a better place, but if you ever wondered how many projects you have it’ll tell you the naked truth.
What looks like a very standard post about getting your ducks in a row as you start into a new year (purge stuff, file, organise) intrigued me a bit. Read the below (or the entire post)
Once all the purge and other items are handled, take a look at all the objects you have in your keep pile. Do you need to do another round of uncluttering? If you’re feeling more courageous about purging items, now is the time to do it. When you are satisfied with your keep pile, sort the objects into new piles of like items — pencils with pencils, envelopes with envelopes, jeans with jeans. When everything is in piles by type, examine what you have and compare it to your storage systems. It is only at that this point that you should consider going out and buying organizing systems. Before you do, though, look through your house or office to see if you already own something that could hold and organize your objects. If you do, you don’t have any need to go out in the cold to buy anything.
Now read it again and don’t think of your desk, home office or kitchen, but about your ‘trusted system’, be it OmniFocus, pen and paper or some cloud-based, ultra-funky, collaborative to-do app.
Lots of parallels between the real and virtual world when it comes to uncluttering!
I am a big Alfred fan and it has replaced LaunchBar for me. Although I am using it for quite a while now, the above free ScreenCastsOnline video tutorial by Don McAllister also taught me a thing or two about Alfred’s PowerPack features.
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Great mind at work: no OmniFocus, no iCloud and no distraction-free writing environment!
John Lennon’s to-do list varied from meeting guys with HBO, to buying marmalade, to errands around the house.
Even rockstars get stuff done! We wonder how he recorded his accomplishments.
(via brainpickings)
Great article describing a common problem many people face who think their work isn’t primarily creative, but actually turns out to be.
To-do list creatives advance in their careers based on the quality of their creative output. Our logistical responsibilities, however, fight against this goal. Most to-do list creatives cannot drop everything to spend days lost in monk-like focus. But the result of instead squeezing creative work into distracted bursts, driven by deadline pressure, is mediocrity.
Cal Newport comes up with an approach and a set of rules similar to the ones I use whereby I try to block at least one 90 minute block per day out of my schedule to focus.
- At the beginning of each week, decide on the one (or, at most, two) big creative projects that will receive your attention over the next five days. Ignore the temptation to make a small amount of progress on a large amount of projects. Creative work is hard. If you want high-quality output, you have to focus your energy.
- Block out time for these projects on your calendar. The increments should at least 1 hour long, and preferably 2 to 3. When you block these hours out depends on your schedule for the week. What’s important, however, is that you treat these blocks like you would any other important appointment: the time is inviolable, and you must work around these blocks when scheduling meetings or other work.
- Set rules for your creative blocks. The rules should describe what is NOT allowed during creative work. For example, I have a strict ban on email during creative blocks.
- Focus on process, not goals. The final piece is arguably the most important: don’t set goals for your creative blocks. Creative work is not a task to be checked off a next actions list. If you decide that you need to complete a particular project by the end of a block, for example, you’re likely to either be frustrated by your lack of progress or rush out something mediocre. Instead, focus on process. Decide how, exactly, you are going to approach the work. This focuses your energy. High-quality results will follow naturally from this focused work.
