Simplicity Is Bliss

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 for GTD system)

When David Allen envisioned the GTD system the economy was in the transition from the traditional industry age to the information age. By now many of the GTD aficionados are what is broadly defined as knowledge workers. Technology has significantly evolved in the last years and any productivity system that utilisies technology needs to take this into account and evolve as well. Particular the contexts in which we work have changed due to the ubiquitous availability of technology, internet connectivity and online collaboration tools. In his original book “Getting Things Done” David Allen used four criteria for selecting the action you should work on next:

1. Context (availability of tools like phone, computer, internet connection, office)
2. Time (time you have at hand, e.g. before the next meeting starts)
3. Energy (the level of attention you can devote to the task)
4. Priority (if you still need to chose between tasks which one is most important)

This all makes perfectly sense in an age where the tools you use to get the job done aren’t always available. But in the last decade this has dramatically change, especially for knowledge workers.

Contexts became ubiquitous

Today, where ever you are, most of your tools are always available. Your smartphone travels with you and allows you not only to do phone calls, but read and respond to email, browse the web, access collaboration and corporate tools and do your banking. Most of the time we also either carry a laptop or a tablet computer with us, which provides even more tools and possibilities. And with 3G networks and WiFi hotspots being available at nearly every street corner, internet connectivity has long moved away from the static office or home environment. Actually, for many of us “office” has become an optional place to be at for work. FaceTime, Skype and other tools allows us to (video) conference with the people we work with and DropBox, SharePoint and other platforms allows us to share documents and do other great things in a group. Without a doubt some tasks remain tight to a brick and mortar environments as you still can’t mow the lawn from your iPhone.

Time & attention are the new limitations

As a consequence listing our tasks by contexts that define the environment we are in or the tools available to us seems no longer appropriate. We aren’t restricted by availability anymore, we are restricted by the choices we make. You can always email, but you chose not to. Having phone calls can happen anytime and anyplace, but it’s your choice to ring that difficult co-worker. The decisions we make today in terms of the next action we engage in is determine by time and attention available. Whereby attention is a combination of energy and priority. Priorities are either imposed on us, but more often they are also a choice we make: “What is important to me?”

New contexts to be adopted

Based on this reasoning and the day-to-day experience we have, it seems no longer the best setup to have contexts such as email, computer, web and so forth. It is time to find a new way to organise tasks, a way that reflects our most precious resources: time & attention. Here are the new context choices I have made and which work nicely for me:

• Short Dashes - Everything that is done in a very short amount of time (typically 5-10 minutes). This includes looking things up, writing an email (something I kept separate for some time during my experiment, but came to realised that emails are mostly short dashes as well), setting up a meeting, doing your bank business or buy a new app.
• Brain Dead - Whenever I am low on energy, which happens at least once a day, I need tasks that I can do without a great deal of thinking such as submitting my time card, file and tag documents, fill-out some stupid Excel sheet or upload the pictures from the last weekend trip.
• Routines - Things that keep me and my system going and most importantly protect sanity. Tasks like my Weekly Review require a special sort of time and attention to get properly engaged with.
• Full Focus - That’s the big one, the “quality and uninterrupted time” and “high energy” context. This is where tasks sit that really define the work that I am doing. Be it writing a proposal, a blog post or a long email, analysing a complex Excel, intense research or designing a PowerPoint presentation or a website. I at least set aside 90 minutes per day to just work on one or two actions in this context and I basically go “offline” during that time.
• Thinking - We all have these projects that we need to think through, whether you do mind mapping or just sit on a bench and watch nature, there is again a special kind of time and attention you need to have and devote to think things through.
• Calls - I kept this one separate although you could think this may fall in to “Short Dashes” as well. (Video) calls in the sense of one-on-one conversations however are quality interactions since they are still the next best thing to a physical meeting. I want to make sure I devote the right time and attention to them as the people I interact with deserve nothing less than this.
• Hanging around - That’s when you have quite some time, but relative low energy levels. I find myself in more of a “consumption”-mode during this state and prefer watching some educational videos, read some articles or catch-up on a recorded WebEx call. Very often I look at this context in the evening, surfing the sofa with my iPad.

These seven contexts contain 80% of my tasks now and they work perfectly fine for me. I have retained some traditional contexts as well, which are either describing a physical location like home (mow the lawn!), office (pick up mail from mail room!) or errands (buy paint for the kitchen!) or relate to people (agendas/waiting fors). But that’s it really.

Working with the new contexts

Things became far more natural for me using these new contexts and that is simply for the fact that I typically have everything I need (phone, laptop/iPad and internet connection) with me in 90% of the cases. What really varies is the time and attention I have at a given point in time. If I have 20 minutes before my next conference call start I typically do two or three tasks from my “Short Dashes”. If I am in “the zone” and have great energy and uninterrupted time, which I typically schedule, I dive in to “Full Focus” tasks. With just 30 minutes but good energy I engage on “Thinking” tasks and when phasing out of the work day I typically start “Hanging Around” a bit. Calls and Routines are slotted in as and when they fit, however some core routines are scheduled such as my Weekly Review on a Friday. When I am really low on energy and start starring at my screen, I take on things from the “Brain Dead” context. That’s my take on GTD contexts in the knowledge worker age and I am curious what creative context setups you have developed for yourself. Share them in the comments, please.

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 be bothered with such a mundane task like “Do Weekly Backup”. But maybe it’s not the repeating tasks or projects you don’t want to see. Some like to keep a Chinese wall between professional and private tasks and while at work don’t want to be distracted by any private things requiring attention. Although I don’t think that that clear division still makes sense in our “Knowledge Worker” age, I understand why people like to do this. At least, and most importantly, they still capture everything that has their attention, be it in the job or at home, consistently in one system.

No filter for everything

First of all my answer might have been disappointing to my reader. OmniFocus simply doesn’t have a filter for everything in it’s View Bar (Menu > View > Show View Bar or Command-Shift-T) and hence you can’t ask it to not show tasks that are repeating ones. And there is nothing wrong with this. OmniFocus is already relative complex and difficult to learn for some users. Adding more possibilities and features may not necessarily improve this situation. And you don’t need to add new features all the time if there is already a suitable solution (call it ‘work around’ if you like). This actually is the case for the above question. Here is the overview of the solution I suggested:

1. Move all your repetitive actions into corresponding ‘Single Action Lists’, e.g. Daily, Weekly, Monthly, ..
2. Create a top-level folder, e.g. “Routines”, to include all the above lists plus any repeating projects you may have
3. In ‘Planning Mode’ select all top-level items from which you’d like to see actions, i.e. with the exception of the “Routines” folder and focus on them
4. Switch to ‘Context Mode’ and build your Perspective as usual
5. Make sure restoring ‘Focus’ is activated for the Perspective in the Perspective Settings

This example neatly demonstrates the power of OmniFocus ‘Focus’ feature as it also limits the focus when used in ‘Context Mode’. Whatever you’d like to see, or better not see, can be focussed/defocussed if the general structure of your OmniFocus library is designed in the right way. In my post about “Making sense of Single-Action Lists in OmniFocus” I already covered point 1 and 2 of the above list. Consequently I will devote the rest of this post to the remaining three steps.

Focus/Defocus as you like

Once a solid structure of the OmniFocus Library is established you can easily select and deselect those ‘areas’ from which you like or not like to see tasks from. Again you can use this to separate work and fun, maintenance tasks from project tasks or customer A from customer B. We’ll stick with the example of excluding repetitive tasks, which we have previously all gathered in one top level folder, from a context-based Perspective. Initially we need to switch to project view, or how it is called in OmniFocus: ‘Planning Mode’ (Menu > View > Planning Mode or Command-1). You should now see the entire structure of your OmniFocus library in the sidebar. If you don’t, make sure you have removed any Focus you may have applied previously. Now select those top level items, folders and/or projects, from which you do like to see the tasks in your Perspective. You can be more granular and even select individual projects or sub-folders in your structure. However, since this may become inconsistent as you create new subfolders and projects over time, I tend to advise to stick to the top level items. In my case I like to focus on my Single Actions bucket and all projects that are either related to customers, work or home. My other folders contain repeating maintenance tasks, templates for common projects and checklists and of course my not yet actionable Someday/Maybe items. Once completed, focus the selected items (Menu > View > Focus on… or Command-Control-F). All items that weren’t selected should disappear from the sidebar and the window title of OmniFocus should reflect the selected focus.

Build the Perspective of your Choice

Now switch to ‘Context Mode’ (Menu > View > Context Mode or Command-2) since our intention was to create a Perspective in which you execute on actions. This, by Getting Things Done law, typically happens in a context and hence we create supporting Perspectives in OmniFocus’ Context Mode. I am not going to go into any details here in terms of what kind of Perspective you are building. Whether you want to see only the next actions or all available ones, sort by due date or group by start date. If you need some inspiration for possible Perspectives make sure you check out the OmniFocus Perspective Galore post series.

Restoring Focus (again and again and again)

Once you are happy with your Perspective make sure you save it. The last and final step is to make sure the Focus we have previously applied gets restored every time you invoke your new Perspective. In order to do that we need to show and expand the Perspective Settings window of OmniFocus (Menu > Perspectives > Show Perspectives or Command-Control-P). Now select your freshly create Perspective from the list and make sure you set the checkbox under ‘Restore:’ called ‘Focus’. This little setting makes sure that every time you activate the selected Perspective, either through the menu, the Perspective window or the defined keyboard shortcut, the Focus as originally selected when building it is restored in the exact same way.

The Focus functionality of OmniFocus is a very helpful one as it obviously helps removing information which isn’t relevant at the very moment. That’s what it’s all about and that also why you actually find it being part of the application’s name. However, it rarely gets used, at least by most of the OmniFocus practitioners I have been in touch with. It took me personally about 2 years with the application before I started using it with comfort. Initially I kept away from it since it confused me when switching modes and perspectives, looking for tasks that should be there but weren’t since I was still focusing on another project. If it gets used, focus is mainly applied in the ‘Planning Mode’ and onto a single project. Either because you’d like to home in on it, get some brainstorming, planning or re-organisation done or sometimes you may even like to execute tasks in that view. This post should help you also embracing the full power of the ‘Focus’ functionality in Perspectives, particular in context-based Perspectives.

There are only certain tasks you can perform depending on where you are, when you are and what tools you have available. This is one of the core Getting Things Done principles that helps you focus on the tasks you actually can do instead of procrastinating over all the task you should or could do. At any given time I have approximately 700+ tasks in my OmniFocus and I could worry quite a bit when, if and how I could get them ever done. But I try not to instead I try to narrow down on those tasks at hand and contexts are what make this possible for me. Contexts are the first natural selection of tasks when you are in the ‘Do’ phase as they determine of what can be done.

Coming up with and maintaining contexts

However, it is very easy to over or under engineer the number of contexts you really need. Many implementations have far too many, others seem to ignore context altogether. The latter is fine when you are not into Getting Things Done, but then again you should use a more generic task manager instead of OmniFocus, which is clearly 100% GTD geared. There are three rules to help you define and, even more important, to maintain a reasonable and useful number of contexts.

Rule #1: Categorise your contexts

With very few exceptions the contexts I have seen and used myself in OmniFocus (or any GTD implementation) fall into three distinct categories. When sticking to those three categories you should also be able to determine exclusive definitions and hence don’t fall into the ‘I need to assign this action to multiple context’-trap, which some OmniFocus users have. The three categories are:

• Places - Certain locations enable or allow you to do certain things. You can only pick up the office mail if you have access to your postbox or you can only paint the kids’ room wall if you are at home.
• Tools - You need specific helpers at hand to complete an action. Be it your computer, a telephone, a broadband access or whatever tooling you need to do your job.
• People - Following-up on something or talking about a topic is only possible if you are meeting an individual or a group of people. These are the famous ‘agenda’-contexts which provide you a list of topics to discuss with someone or to raise in a regular meeting. ‘Waiting For’ also falls into the people category since it is mostly individuals you need to do something for you, although in some occasions it might also be companies that you are waiting for.

Looking at my contexts, they all fall into these three categories, at least at the root level. Occasionally I have some contexts that I would called ‘activity’-focussed, but I’ll cover them later in this post.

Rule #2: Don’t go over board

It’s relatively easy to end up having far too many contexts and this where most people go numb. While there is no best practice in terms of number, there are a few key principles that can help you determine whether you need a certain context in you list

• Does this context typically carry more than two actions?
• Is this a place/tool/person that I visit/use/meet regularly?
• Is this context exclusive or is there overlap with others?
• Am I going to granular? Could this action be assigned to a more generic context and it would still work? (see question one)

If you ask yourself these questions, and you can really just do it in a trial and error approach, you should be able to stick with a relative limited and static set of contexts. As said earlier there is no best practice in terms of number of contexts, but in most cases the levers are typically how much people you interact with and how many places you visit on a regular basis. These two factors may leave with you with a relative small or a hugh number of contexts. Depending on your job, people and places may also make your contexts more dynamic. If you do for example project based work (and many of us do this, I suppose), you may have different stakeholders and potentially new places with every new project. In this case you need to look at the third rule on a more frequent basis.

Rule #3: Review your contexts regularly

Reviews are the big mantra of Getting Things Done anyway, but every now and then you should also engage in a ‘meta review’. What I mean with this is a review of your productivity and task management system per se. What works and what doesn’t? I do this every six months, some (need to) do it more frequent some less. While this ‘meta review’ would be a separate post in itself, the one thing I also look at are my contexts. I am basically using the meta view to ask myself the questions I’ve listed under rule #2. Plus I also check if contexts which have a more temporary nature, e.g. a person I only work with on a specific project, are still relevant. Assigning actions to contexts This is a crucial part of your workflow and it’s often done the wrong way. Getting Things Done suggests two different stages when capturing a new action: The first is ‘Collect’ in which you should really just enter that thought or clip that email/website your are reading that, for whatever reason, has you attention. It will then happily sit in your OmniFocus Inbox and not yet move to specific context and project/list. While for actions that are clearly related to on-going projects and very obvious how they need to be performed you don’t need to think much, the second phase called ‘Process’ is actually extremely important to keep yourself sane and protected from collecting and committing to many activities. Only when you have time and process your inbox is when you can reflect on whether something really needs action, whether you need to do it yourself, if it is a single task or actually a new project and finally where, with whom or which tools in needs to be performed.

Pre-defining project contexts

OmniFocus offers the possibility to pre-assign a context to all actions in a specific project. It’s likely not the most frequent used feature of OmniFocus and hence I am not sure whether it is that useful, but here is how you define the default context for a particular project.

Select the project and show the inspector (Menu > Inspectors > Show Inspectors or Cmd+Shift+I). Right under the Type and Status setting you can find a drop down in which you can select the default context of the project from you existing list of contexts. Any new action assigned to or created in this project will inherit this context automatically. You can certainly change the context for each action manually and any context you assign when creating or filing the action will not be overwritten by this setting.

Sample Contexts

This is the complete list of context I use on a day-to-day basis. Most of them are pretty static and usually have good number of actions assigned to. While I travel quite a bit and also get to work with a number of different individuals inside the large organisations I work with and for, there are typically not enough actions for those people and places to justify their own context.

Places

I have very few places I am at on a regular basis. For travel I use to have one separate context, but that didn’t really work for me since my actions are more tool- or person related than to places and hence there hasn’t been much I could only do when in the train or plane. However, I do have a travel context in my errands section since there are a few things I like to buy in places where I travel to. Having a home and a corporate office there are a few, mainly repeating actions, I can only perform when in one of these places. Picking up the mail or shipping my expense report for example can only happen in my corporate office, scanning documents (into Evernote) or using one of my other computers is only happening in my home office. A trick I pull quiet often is to also assign actions to the root context (in this case ‘Office’). These are typically actions I can perform at more than one if not all sub-contexts. Printing a document for example can be done either in my home or my corporate office and hence I assign it to the ‘Office’ root context. Errands I run either online (kind of a virtual place), very often at Amazon and hence I made this a specific context, in the town I live in or the city I work in (if I am at my corporate office) or, as mentioned earlier, while travelling. If I would be more regular at certain shops, I would properly have s sub-context for them, but that isn’t really the case. All sub-contexts I had dropped out when I asked myself the questions of rule #2. Note that I use an iPhone App called ‘Groceries’ and hence the typical context of the supermarket isn’t in OmniFocus. Again if I can buy something either online or in a brick and mortar shop, I would assign it to the ‘Errands’ root level. If I need to buy something online, but not at Amazon, it would get assigned to the ‘Errands:Online’ context.

Tools

Like for most of us my main tool is my Macbook Pro. While I have a couple other Macs (all sitting in my home office), most things get done with the Macbook Pro. Lately things also can get done with the iPad. Since this is my main environment, I have broken it down in a few logical contexts. Like in the ‘Places’ context, I use the ‘Computer’ root context for anything that can either be done on the Macbook or the iPad. Things I can only do on the ‘iPad’, mainly because I need a specific, iPad-only App for them, are assigned to the ‘Computer:iPad’ context. My private expense tracking and financial bud geting is one example of such a iPad-only task. In the Computer category I also have one of these ‘activity’ contexts called ‘Computer:Read/Review’. I separated this context since I typically only engage in extensive reading or reviewing at specific times/energy levels and then batch read/review documents. Most of my daily or weekly review tasks are also assigned to this context. Using OmniFocus and Dropbox 99% of reading and reviewing can be done on either the iPad or the Macbook. Everything else really is covered by my ‘Computer:Macbook’ context which covers all tasks that require specific applications. I have seen people breaking it down to an application-level, but that is pure over-engineering for my and most people’s purposes. ‘Calls’ is an obvious context and since I have either my iPhone or my land line phone available, I can usually do calls at anytime. My ‘Online’ context is again broken down, mainly for the benefit of batch processing. Everything I need to do on the ‘Web‘(in the browser) has it’s place (e.g. updating a wiki, uploading a document, posting to the blog), all ‘Email’ related tasks have their context (I read, process and respond to email typically twice a day) and ’Watch’ is a context that captures all the videos or web conference recordings I’d like or need to watch. One interesting context is the ‘Online:VPN’ one. This captures tasks which I need to perform using web-tools available in my organisations intranet, which I can only access through a VPN connection. That connection is automatically available to me when I am in either my home or my corporate office, but I could also establish it while being out and about. I still decided to create a separate context for it since it helps with batch processing and supports a number of my OmniFocus perspectives better.

People

While I encounter different individuals, both on the customer side but also internally, I have a relative stable group of people I work with on a regular basis. This includes all individuals in the team I manage, my boss, a couple of peers in the same group and the sales team(s) we work with. For all of them I have an ‘Agendas’ context in which I file those topics I need to discuss with them next time around (often related to multiple different projects). Depending on the projects at hand, I may also have a temporary ‘Agendas’ context for a project with all relevant stakeholders below it. As seen before, I tend to use the grouping contexts like ‘Service Design Team’ or ‘Service Sales’ to file topics I need to raise with either that entire group, mainly at regular conference calls or meetings. Every Tuesday for example I have a 30 minutes call with my entire team for general catch up. Topics that need to be addressed as well as the standing agenda for this call are assigned to the ‘Service Design Team’ context. Topics that I need to address with other people, internal ones or customers, that aren’t explicitly listed get assigned to the ‘Agendas’ root context (you seen this before, haven’t you?). My misses, of course, has her very own context under ‘Agendas’. The kids are still to young to have their own context, but I can see that coming in a few years. Finally my ‘Waiting’ context more or less resemble my ‘Agendas’ context, but with a few individuals less. This is mainly due to the fact that most of the time I wait for people in my team or my manager to come back to me. Everyone else I am waiting for gets assigned to the ‘Waiting’ root context.

Summary

Contexts are an important part to any Getting Things Done implementation and OmniFocus offers great functionality in this domain. While contexts inside OmniFocus are mainly utilised in Perspectives, which I’ll cover in another post, it is important to come up with and maintain a reasonable number of useful and meaningful contexts. The three rules in this post should help, but ultimately you need to be comfortable with the contexts.