February 2012
17 posts
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'Creating Flow with OmniFocus' audiobook by... →
Kourosh Dini has turned his popular ebook ‘Creating Flow with OmniFocus’ into an audiobook, which is now available for purchase on his website.
I can only recommend Kourosh’s book and you should buy and read it. He covers many aspects of OmniFocus and gets you setup right. The book I am working on will be different and not focussing too much on how to get started.
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The problem with daily todo lists
Every morning I sit down to plan my day. I first look at my calendar to see how many meetings and conference calls fill my day and how much time is left to do other work.
Many consider conference calls, meetings and at times even email as disruptions of their actual work. I came to understand that these things are part of my work as well. I try to manage them and balance them with the creative...
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Linking to Mail.app mailboxes from OmniFocus →
The notes field in OmniFocus is got for more than just text. My daily routine article had some suggestions about how to link in applications, folders or documents to OmniFocus tasks or projects.
Christopher Mackay’s post covers a very specific use of the note field.
With some Finder magic, as explained by Christopher, you can access individual mailboxes of Mail.app and link to them...
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Chrome URL to OmniFocus task →
Nice little hack from Aaron Hockley
Next time you’re on a web page in Chrome and want to create a related OmniFocus task, just invoke the OmniURL item from Alfred (you could also set a hotkey). A new item will be created in your OmniFocus inbox with the page’s title as the item text and the URL in the notes field.
While leveraging Alfred, the solution is based on this AppleScript hosted on...
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Better repeat options in new OmniFocus for Mac... →
Something many OmniFocus users have been waiting for.
Repeat every weekday.
Or repeat every weekend day.
Or every Tuesday and Thursday
Or …?
If you set up a “repeat every” action and choose a week-based interval, you can now pick which days of the week it should happen on.
More options to come in a future release and subsequently feature parity in...
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A Brief History of the To-Do List and the... →
But the list, it turns out, might also be the origin of both our highest happiness and our dreariest dissatisfaction.
Yep. Great write-up and apparently an interesting book, which goes a bit deeper than “6 reasons why your todo list doesn’t work” posts.
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Getting down to work on my OmniFocus eBook
I have posted late last year that I want to publish an ebook about OmniFocus for Mac in 2012. Throughout the last months I pondered what approach I will take to make the book as useful as possible to as many as possible readers.
Real-life examples and use cases
After querying my dear Twitter followers it became clear that people are mostly curious how others use OmniFocus to get work done. Of...
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The happy secret of better work
Yet again an amazing TED talk. While I went numb on the endless stream of life hacking tips and ‘how to be happier’-guides long time ago, this isn’t resembling any of the typical, slightly esoteric waffling.
Not only does Shawn Anchor deliver a very entertaining and energised talk, he actually knows what he is talking about. I truly believe you can rewire your brain to...
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Use Case: How I use OmniFocus to organise my life →
In his post from October 2010 Tyler Hall provides some insights into how he uses OmniFocus on a daily basis to “get shit done”. While the post obviously is a few days old, it remains inspiring how people put OmniFocus to work in the context of their individual lives, jobs and hats they wear.
I have recently decided that my planned OmniFocus ebook will centre around real-life use...
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Adding actions to OmniFocus from Terminal →
A while ago the great Brett Terpstra, well known for his Markdown tools, has released a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool for adding tasks to OmniFocus. It’s not straight forward to setup as you need to install a few Ruby gems first. If the last sentence sounds like from a different planet, this tool isn’t exactly for you. If you know Ruby, gems and Scripting Bridges, you may actually...
theoendless asked: Hi, great post on the "Daily Review" a while ago. I'd really like to try the "Verify that next actions exist for all projects"-Script You mentioned, but the page where You found it is no linger online. Do You have it (the script) in handy, perhaps?
bellaccione asked: How do I script the OF database? is there a published object model, or do i have to reverse engineer this myself?
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WatchMore on TextExpander and OmniFocus
David Sparks, a man of many trades and fellow blogger, picked up on my recent screencast about combining TextExpander and OmniFocus, and posted one himself. He definitely has some time-saving snippets for OmniFocus on the Mac, which he also made available for download in his original post.
In his post he also covers the use of iOS text shortcuts for similar...
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Export a list of active OmniFocus projects to a... →
Not really sure why I didn’t post about it here, but Justin Lancy of Veritrope scripting fame has picked up on a tweet of mine asking for help exporting a list of all active projects in OmniFocus. His script takes it as far as an alphabetically sorted text file you can save to any location you chose. While I originally wanted an export to OmniOutliner, I believe this solution is more...
January 2012
13 posts
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Quick Entry for OmniFocus on iPad & iPhone →
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...
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Better OmniFocus integration with GMail by... →
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...
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WatchUsing TextExpander and OmniFocus for tracking actions & projects
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...
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Stressing out with your iPhone →
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.
...
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Adding files to OmniFocus with Alfred →
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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Uncluttering in the real and in the virtual world →
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,...
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Getting Creative Things Done →
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...
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Get more out of meetings with TextExpander
I am on a manager’s schedule as opposed to a maker’s schedule. Whether you think this is a bad or good thing, it certainly means that I have a lot of meetings each day. Given that I work in an international cooperation that has a complex, multi-dimensional and geographical distributed organisation, many of my meetings are either audio, web or video conferences. It comes as no...
December 2011
1 post
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Give away & plans for 2012: A OmniFocus ebook!
With 2012 around the corner lots of productive people or people that just pursue goals in their life are starting to think about the next year: What to focus on, what milestones to target and what dreams to turn into reality.
For 2012 I am focussing my writing efforts on an ebook which I will release in the course of the year. Being the OmniFocus and GTD practitioner that I am, the plan...
October 2011
2 posts
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Search and open OmniFocus Projects enhanced with...
One of the things I always come across when using OmniFocus is the need to quickly find and open/focus a particular project. While OmniFocus has it’s own search capabilities and of course allows you to navigate to and focus a specific project. However, this typically doesn’t cut it for me since it involves multiple steps and, depending of the perspective setting you are currently in,...
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WatchThe 30-days-challenge
On one of my too many business travels recently, I enjoy watching TED talks on my iPad like so many others. And there isn’t a single talk that doesn’t offer some inspiration. By the uniqueness of topics, many talks do not offer much practical advise. When I came across this 3:27 minutes talk from Matt Cutts titled “Try something new for 30 days” I was intrigued by it’s...
June 2011
6 posts
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A Fresh Take on Contexts
As my Twitter followers may know, I have been experimenting with a complete new context setup in OmniFocus in the last two to three weeks. Since I am pretty pleased with the result of this fresh approach I thought I share the details and reasons for it. Actually, whether you use OmniFocus, any other GTD tool or just paper lists, this might be relevant for you.
Evolution doesn’t stop (also...
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Linking Evernote notes to OmniFocus tasks →
In one of the recent links I posted a pair of AppleScripts have been used to get Evernote and OmniFocus talking. Ian McCracken has discovered an even simpler way, especially for those that want to stay away from AppleScript magic, leveraging the fact that Evernote exposes it’s note via Spotlight to the Mac OS X file system. The hack involves three steps:
Create a note in Evernote
Create a...
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Get Evernote and OmniFocus talking
There are many relying on Evernote to keep all their notes, snippets, drafts and documents in sync across their devices. Having an application for nearly every (mobile) platform, build-in OCR and seamless cloud sync, Evernote is certainly leading the pack. While I personally dislike the closed system it provides, I can totally understand everyone that is in love it. If you are and you keep your...
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Outlook for Mac 2011 and OmniFocus integration →
If you happen to work in a large corporation like I do, chances are high that you need to integrate with a Microsoft Exchange environment. Dependent on how flexible and open your IT department is you can do this using IMAP or you need to go native Microsoft. In the latter case you’ll hopefully be using Outlook for Mac 2011. If you still want to integrate with your trusted OmniFocus task...
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Using flags in OmniFocus →
Nice short post by Augusto Pinaud (@apinaud) on how he is using flags in OmniFocus. In essence it is very similar to the way I use and recommend using flags in OmniFocus: Bringing attention to your Most Important Task (MITs) every day. Augusto reminds us of some very important aspects like resetting your flags every morning and really forcing yourself to not flag more than three to five tasks at...
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How to effectively use folders in OmniFocus
Folders are great helpers and a curse at the same time. While we work with them naturally on our computers, we need to appreciate that they originate from the days where hugh amounts of paper had to be organised in such fashion it could be easily retrieved again and take little space during storage. The time it takes to file documents and find them back is determined by the complexity of the...
May 2011
9 posts
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OmniFocus from the ground up
The productivity bloggers at Asian Efficiency are putting together a fairly extensive series on OmniFocus with comprehensive blog posts complemented with screen cast. Worthwhile following the post series, which is planned to have include 10 parts. Available today are part 1 and part 2 which get you started with OmniFocus as well as part 3 that talks more about working with OmniFocus on a daily...
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Watch
He did it again! Don Southard, aka @BinaryGhost, who writes the DirtDon techblog is becoming my favorite developer of OmniFocus integrations/extensions. After he offered a very light-weight integration between my favorite application launcher Alfred and OmniFocus, he has now gone all the way and utilised Alfred’s latest feature to interact with shell scripts. The official Alfred update was just...
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Use Alfred to add tasks to OmniFocus →
It’s always great if two of your favorite applications go out and have a drink together. These two needed a little help and @binaryghost showed them how to date in his post about “Use Alfred to add tasks to OmniFocus”. Creating a customer search in Alfred makes it possible to trigger OmniFocus through it’s URI scheme.
I don’t like the fact that the added tasks doesn’t go straight to the...
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Part 3 of OmniFocus Ninja Tricks screen cast by... →
In the third and final part of David Sparks screen cast series “OmniFocus Ninja Tricks”, you see David providing again good overview to OmniFocus’ standard functionality. It’s not so much about geeking out with OmniFocus, but it gets you to master all the basics. I can’t recommend this enough to people who are new to OmniFocus or just didn’t have the 360° overview yet.
In this final episode of...
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Speed-up OmniFocus syncing by trimming the... →
Here is a great and detailed description about a monthly routine on how to trim some fat from your OmniFocus database & speed up syncing. We all sometimes suffer from bloated database files that make the synchronisation process take longer than required. Although the OmniGroup has invested heavily to improve sync speeds (and they certainly succeeded bug time), there is still some risk that...
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The Power of Focus for OmniFocus Context...
Two weeks ago one of my readers asked me a question on perspectives:
Is it possible to create a perspective that automatically *excludes* all repetitive actions/tasks?
This is a particular interesting question since I can see the use case behind it. Your repeating actions are typically maintenance tasks and while you are in “the flow”, being creative and what not, you may not want to...
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OmniFocus Perspectives Galore - Agendas & Waiting...
While in the last three posts we have looked at ways you can use Perspectives to focus on actions which you want to do today, are on your next action list or are simply due, this time around we want to look at actions you track which concern other people. Unless you are living under a rock in the industrial age (which means your Mosaic browser can’t display this site anyway) your work is...
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This is where I work
I have covered aspects of how I work on this blog so I thought it was time to talk a bit about where I work. The environment we work in is influencing the result of our work and consequently the success we all strive for nearly as substantial as the methodology we apply and the tools we use to get the work done. My work often involves traveling around Europe and I tweeted about how my MacBook Air...
April 2011
4 posts
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Project Management and OmniFocus
Just the day before yesterday the OmniGroup released the beta of OmniPlan 2.0, the project management and planning software from the OmniFocus makers, into the wild (download it here). And as many expected the good folks around Ken Case are working on improved sharing and collaboration features using the OmniSync Service (WebDAV) already known from OmniFocus. A tighter integration between project...
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