Simplicity Is Bliss

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.

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 very likely project-driven and you are collaborating with a larger set of people on a daily basis. Whether these are constantly changing or you more or less always deal with the same folks doesn’t really make a difference. It’s also irrelevant whether you track actions or items for customers, co-workers, your manager or other freelancers you are collaborating with on a project. The idea is that you have one consistent view on who is responsible to deliver on which action and what topics need to be raised with the team or individuals.

Agenda & Waiting For contexts

Before we can create useful Perspectives, we need to understand how you implement the corresponding contexts we will use. Although I have previously described how I define and manage contexts, I’d like to use the opportunity to discuss two different schools of thought on tracking agenda items and ‘waiting fors’.

Option 1: People-centric contexts

This approach is relative logical and and has two different variations. The idea is whenever you meet or get on the phone withe someone, you can simply pull up the context for this individual and see all actions that you are either waiting for and topics you noted to discuss. Simply taking the persons name as one flat context is the simplest of all setups. So no matter whether you need to ‘discuss preparation of planning meeting’ with Andrea or you are waiting for him to ‘send new Excel template’, you simply assign both actions to the ‘Andrea’ context. Now this variation has the down-side that those tasks that you are ‘waiting for’ to be completed by Andrea still show up in many of your other views and perspectives as they are treated as regular, i.e. actionable tasks. Typically you’d like them to be unavailable since you can’t do much about them throughout the day with the exception of when you review them or meet the owner of the task. This is why the second variation of the People-centric approach is a bit more granular: Under the context named after the person you would create two sub-contexts, one for agenda items that need discussion and one for ‘waiting for’ items you’d like to track.

Option 2: Type-centric contexts

It is certainly not advisable to drop the name of people altogether since you want to track things related to individuals. However, you can of course change the hierarchal order of your contexts by creating a general ‘Agendas’ context at the top level of your contexts list as well as a ‘Waiting For’ context at the same level. Within these contexts you can now create contexts for individuals, teams or even for regular meetings/calls (like a ‘Monday Forecast Call’ or a ‘Friday Metric Review’). You can even use a hierarchy when doing so. I, for example, have a context for my team under ‘Agendas’ and below the team context one for each of the members of my team. Stuff I like to discuss on our team call or during our team meeting gets assigned to the team’s context, the topics only relevant to individuals end up in one of the below contexts. The downside of this approach certainly is that you have basically two contexts, one agenda and one ‘waiting for’ per person sitting in somewhat separate branches of your context tree. Although this isn’t ideal either it is my preferred option as I like to distinguish between things I need to talk about and things I have delegated and am waiting for completion/response. One of my Twitter followers highlighted the difference of delegated and ‘waiting for’ to me while I was working on this post. Quiet honestly: I don’t distinguish at that level of granularity as it would make my system too complex really. If I have delegated something I typically wait for a result or a response - that’s it.

People Perspectives

My job is all about working with people. As a typical knowledge worker I don’t produce “real” things, I try hard to create value by establishing human connections and a network of knowledge. While this sounds as exciting and strange as it is, the challenge is in the word ‘people’. Luckily people come in all forms and shapes and demonstrate very different behaviors. You may have one team member who always delivers (on time) and you could even stop tracking anything she owes you, but then there is this peer of you who requires you to even track the promise he gave you about returning your call. Some of your co-workers or buddies may be GTD’lers, some may even use OmniFocus, others may only live of post-its or are just a complete chaos. I’ve learned some time ago that it doesn’t work to impose a system or methodology on other people, even if they are your direct reports and you technically could. Offer help and advise on personal productivity and time & attention management where it is requested, but stop evangelising others or force them into the system that works conveniently for you. On the other hand, it would drive you mad if you would align with every single behavior you experience at work as well as in your private sphere. Instead you need to find the right system and associated effort that works for you. OmniFocus offers some good ways to track topics and open items you have with individuals, but doesn’t offer all desirable functionality. Something which may improve with OmniFocus 2.0, which is likely to include more “collaboration” features. I personally wish I could associate a specific action with a person in addition to a context like ‘waiting’ or ‘agenda’ - this would make lots of things described later in this post significantly easier. In essence your people-related perspectives should do a couple of things:

• Allow you to see everything you are waiting for other people/teams/organisations to complete/respond to
• Offer you a handy list of topics you wanted to raise with an individual or at a specific meeting/conference call (incl. things you are waiting for)

The below two Perspectives of mine do exactly this and I use them on a regular basis. I review the ‘Waiting For’ Perspective as part of my Daily Review every morning to see whether I need to send gentle reminders to some individuals. When I meet or get on a call with someone, I bring up my ‘People’ Perspective which shows me ‘Waiting For’ and agenda items for all key individuals and the same for regular, standing calls with teams or virtual teams huddling for a specific topic. Needless to say that I also review ‘Waiting Fors’ as part of my Weekly Review every Friday afternoon.

‘Waiting For’-Perspective

My ‘Waiting For’ Perspective only displays, as you would expect, items I am waiting for. I employ a few tricks to make it as useful as possible to me. First of all I focus only on folders of my OmniFocus library which contain active items, basically ignoring Someday/Maybe and Project Templates. I make sure I filter for all ‘Remaining’ outstanding actions in the View Bar (Command-Shift-V) so I get the full picture. Grouping them by context helps to keep all outstanding actions under one person, team or event. Those actions due soon or, god forbid, overdue should show up first under each person and hence I sort by ‘Due’.

Another helpful setting is to also restore layout and expansion with this Perspective. I am basically hiding the context sidebar to get a more minimalistic view of my ‘Waiting For’-window, but you could even go as far as also hiding the toolbar (Control-Option-T). Restoring expansion makes sure that all actions are visible under the contexts by which they are grouped.

You need to have your top-level ‘Waiting For’ context selected in the context sidebar (before hiding it) and restore this selection to really make this Perspective work. Finally pick a nice icon for the Perspective and add a rememberable keyboard shortcut. Control-W works great for me.  

‘Agendas’-Perspective

My Agendas Perspective isn’t much different to my ‘Waiting For’ one. Basically I select next to the ‘Waiting For’ top-level context also the ‘Agendas’ top-level context. The remaining settings are pretty much the same.

Loading Context and Planning Mode Perspectives simultaneously

Now there is one additional trick I use for my People Perspective. Using the ‘Settings from a Project mode perspective’ option in the Perspective window (Command-Control-P) I make sure OmniFocus loads my plain simple Inbox view as the Perspective for the Planning Mode view (Command-1). This is very handy in a meeting or call as you go through the items and outstanding actions as well as discussing new things. Whenever something comes up in the discussion that I like to capture - be it an action on me, some term I need research, … - I use Command-1 to quickly switch to my Inbox and simple hit enter to capture a new item and then use Command-2 to go back to the Context Mode view that still has my ‘People’ Perspective loaded in order to discuss remaining points of the list. The resulting view is again fairly similar to the ‘Waiting For’ view. So why to I even bother to have two Perspectives if they are so similar. It just better fits my workflow and increases focus in that very moment when I need this information. During my Daily Review every morning I only want to see ‘Waiting For’s’ to decide whether I need to follow-up with someone today. When in a meeting/call with someone, I need to see all topics to be discussed as well as open actions I am waiting for to review status and progress.

Limitations & Improvements

This is as best as it gets, at least as good as I have been able to set it up. The limitation you will be facing with this setup is the scrolling you need to do when looking at agenda items as well as waiting for items when being in a meeting with someone. It’s a minor limitation, but still annoying. Hence my earlier wish to get ‘People’ as an extra entity into OmniFocus (2.0 maybe, Ken, what do you think?) so you can use it as another filtering/selection criterion which should deliver even more power to OmniFocus magical Perspective feature. While you could think it may add to complexity as well I think it can actually reduce it. If you feel I have rushed through some steps in the post or didn’t explain enough on some details of how to make certain settings please read the other posts of the OmniFocus Perspectives Galore series, particular the first ‘Basics’ post, which provides all details you need. You are likely to find additional inspiration in these posts as well.

In the first two post of the OmniFocus Perspective Galore series I have covered a ‘Today’ view together with basics of Perspectives in OmniFocus and described enhancements to the build-in ‘Next Actions’ view. This time I’d like to focus on another build-in Perspective of OmniFocus: The ‘Due’ Perspective. You’ll find it readily available once you have downloaded and installed OmniFocus for Mac. However, there are a few enhancements we can bring to that Perspective as well and it allows us to explore what the ‘Restore: Expansion’ setting for Perspectives does.

Setting the Scope

Initially we need to make sure we set the right scope for the Perspective. In context mode (Menu: ‘View > Context Mode’ or Command-2), invoke the ‘View Bar’ (Menu: ‘View > Show View Bar’ or Command-Shift-V) and select ‘Remaining’ for the Context Filter. This makes sure you get tasks that are due from all contexts, also those that are ‘On Hold’. Particular for ‘Waiting For’ contexts, which are typically set to ‘On Hold’, you want to make sure you don’t miss a due date for task you have delegated.

Grouping and Sorting should both be set to ‘Due’. The task grouping will allow us later to play with the expansion state for the different task groups. OmniFocus does very intelligent grouping for due tasks. Assuming you have tasks with corresponding due dates, you will find groups for ‘Due within the last week’, ‘Due yesterday’, ‘Due today’, ‘Due tomorrow’, ‘Due within the next week’ and so on. In order to later configure your expansion state correctly, I suggest you make sure you have at least one tasks in each of the mentioned groups. The Sorting basically sorts descending by due dates (soonest first). While there is little sense of sorting inside the ‘Yesterday’, ‘Today’ and ‘Tomorrow’ groups, the other groups spanning longer timeframes will benefit from this setting.

The Availability filter should be set to ‘Remaining’. No matter if the due task is the next one in the project or actually tasks blocking the project, e.g. ‘Waiting For’, doesn’t really matter. I assume you’d like to see any task that is due, regardless of where it sits in the system. Otherwise you wouldn’t set a due date on it, would you?

The Importance of the Status Filter

You have a choice to limit the scope to tasks that are overdue, due today and due soon (in the next few days - see setting in ‘OmniFocus Preferences > Data tab’) by setting the Status filter to ‘Due Soon’, which is what I recommend. Leaving it at ‘Any Status’ will also show you tasks that are due in 6, 12 months or even further down the line. If we would have the ‘Forecast’ view from OmniFocus for iPad, this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but in the current user interface things tend to become a bit messy. My general use case for my ‘Due’ Perspective is that I’d like to see what is overdue or needs to be done either today or the next few days, hence the ‘Due Soon’ Status Filter.

Unless you have some specific requirements, I recommend to leave the Estimated Time Filter at ‘Any Duration’.

Restoring Collapsed/Expanded State of Task Groups

With all those settings done, we can now focus on the Expansion state modifications. With the exception of ‘Due today’ I generally collapse all task groups as you can see in the screenshot. This allows me to focus on what’s on for today, but with one click (or key press) I can still access tasks that are either overdue or need my attention tomorrow or in the next couple of days. Whether in this or any other Perspective you can expand and collapse groups as you like (also in Planning Mode Perspectives) and by setting the ‘Restore: Expansion’ checkbox in OmniFocus’ Perspective Window (‘Menu > Perspectives > Show Perspectives’ or Command-Control-P) that exact state is restored every time you access the Perspective.

While I will cover the effect of setting or not setting the ‘Restore: Selection’ checkbox in one of the next posts, this time around, please just make sure it is checked. Finally you can, if you like, clean-up the window a bit and add or remove columns in the window’s main area. I have described the required steps for this in my ‘OmniFocus Perspectives Galore - Basics & Today View’ post. If you make any modifications to the layout, make sure you set the ‘Restore: Layout’ checkbox as well to get those changes back every time you go that Perspective.

Of course, you should finish by setting a keyboard shortcut for this Perspective and potentially your own flavor of a Perspective icon (I use these). I hope you have enjoyed this post, learned a few new tricks and are reading the other posts of the OmniFocus Perspective Galore series.

This post of the OmniFocus Perspectives Galore series is a rather short one since it deals with a Perspective that already ships with OmniFocus out-of-the-box: Next Actions. ‘Next Actions’ is potentially the view in OmniFocus most people use when they are in execution mode and simply do the things on their list. Many also use it to skim through what’s on and what they wish/need to tackle today. The standard settings for the Perspective are perfectly fine to do just that. However, there are still some enhancements that I have applied to the build-in Perspective:

Having all the right columns at hand

I very often go through my ‘Next Actions’-view and simply do a quick review of the tasks. Sometimes I change a due date as things have changed in the related project, other times I assign a new start date as I don’t need to get to the related task just now. For a few tasks I also occasionally like to assign an estimated effort since I sometimes engage in what I call small batch processing by grabbing a number of tasks that do not require lots of time and get them out of my way.

As per my post about my ‘Today’ Perspective, I also use the ‘Next Actions’ Perspective to run through all tasks at hand and flag (Command-Shift-L) those, which I like/need to do today, aka Most Important Tasks (MITs).

Hence I like my ‘Next Actions’ Perspective to feature the start date, due date and estimates column by default. This allows me to quickly browse through all available tasks and add or change information as I like. The nice thing is I can do this using my keyboard only and without the need to bring up the ‘Inspector’ window of OmniFocus, which is one of the few things I don’t like that much about the application.

Access the ‘View Bar’ in OmniFocus through the menu (View > View/Hide View Bar) or simply press Command-Shift-V; I guess you figured by now that I really recommend to learn the keyboard shortcuts of your favorite applications. Once the ‘View Bar’ is visible you should also see the column headers in OmniFocus’ main content area. Right click the column header bar and add or remove the columns you like/don’t like to show up. You can also change the width for each column so information gets displayed the best possible way. Hide the ‘View Bar’ again once you are done.

Focussing on the right things

Another aspect of the ‘Next Actions’ Perspective you might consider customising is the contexts that are selected. First of all I use the ‘View Bar’ to limit the contexts displayed to those which are ‘Active’, i.e. contain accessible actions. This typically drops rarely used and therefore empty contexts from the list and in particular filters out contexts which are ‘On Hold’, i.e. all my ‘Waiting For’ contexts. In a second step I select only those contexts which contain actions I can execute autonomously, i.e. without sitting down or meeting someone online. Selecting most of my top-level contexts with the exception of the ‘Agendas’-top-level does the trick. You can find more on contexts in my ‘Defining and Managing Contexts in OmniFocus’ post.

Now that I have limited the contexts in scope, I also like to move the divider between the context list and the main window area to the far left to practically hide the context list. Finally I hide the ‘View Bar’ and take a snapshot of the Perspective to make sure all changes are saved (Menu > Perspective > Take Snapshot Of Next Actions).

On Grouping, Sorting and Filtering

While you have many options to group your tasks, grouping them by ‘Context’ makes most sense to me when it comes to the ‘Next Actions’ Perspective. At least I look through my next actions by the context in which they need to be executed.

Typically I don’t care much about the order in which tasks are listed, but in my ‘Next Actions’ Perspective I like to have any flagged items show up first in the list. As mentioned earlier, flagged actions are either MITs or maintenance tasks and are paramount for me to progress against my goals and keep my system in a ‘trusted’ state. My ‘Sorting’-filter is therefore set to ‘Flagged’.

Filtering seems to be a straight forward thing by selecting ‘Next Action’, doesn’t it? It really can be, depending on how you setup your projects.
If you define more complex projects, especially if you are nesting sequential task groups in parallel projects, which can be quite useful at times, the ‘Next Action’-filter will not do what you like it to do.
It always only displays the first action in a project, assuming that the action is available. In a parallel project with sequential task groups, you are likely to want the first action of every sequential task group to be shown in your ‘Next Actions’-Perspective (assuming again that the first action of the task group is available). If that is the case, you need to set your ‘Availability’-filter to ‘Available’ in your Perspective settings. Initially you may not see a lot of difference in the actual list, but you now have these two or three tasks from the mentioned project types, which were off the radar before.

Finally: Make sure you check-out the others posts in this OmniFocus Perspective Galore series.

One of the most advanced features of OmniFocus are Perspectives, which, in short, allow you to view your actions applying different filters. While Perspectives unleash the true potential of OmniFocus they are equally complex to master. It is one of the aspects where many people that are actually looking for a simple list manager give up on OmniFocus. This series of posts is aimed to help exploring the power of Perspectives and how to make them useful and valuable to your workflow.

In the introduction to Perspectives we will focus on the true basics: Creating, accessing and modifying Perspectives in OmniFocus for Mac. With each post we will also create a new, in some cases modify an existing, Perspective. At the end of this series you should have some key Perspectives available that should help you focus on your work since that is what Perspectives are all about.

What’s on for Today - Due or Flagged Tasks

The first perspective you may find useful is a ‘Today’-view which should list all actions that are either due today (need to be done) or that you’d like to devote time to today (should be done). Tasks that are due are easy to retrieve as we will use the ‘Due Date’ field of the task to filter them. Those tasks you wish to do today will be filtered using the ‘Flagged’ state. Consequently all tasks you wish to do need to be flagged before. You can have general flags on repetitive, routine tasks or projects as well as skim through your ‘Next Actions’ list and flag those you deem important for today. There is a whole philosophy on which and how many tasks to flag and plan for the day, but we will investigate that another time.

Just a couple tips on flagging:

• Quick flagging: When browsing through your task list, activate the tasks you like to flag and just press Command-Shift-L (same to un-flag)
• Flags are inherited in projects and task groups: If you flag a project or a group of tasks, all children will be flagged as well

Please don’t go overboard with flagging tasks. If your ‘Today’ list ends up being nearly as long as your ‘Next Actions’ list, something went wrong. Next to routine tasks (e.g. Daily Review/Check eMail reminders) I typically only flag a maximum of three tasks that I’d like to get done that day.

Filtering on Due and Flagged

Now that we know what we’ like to show in our ‘Today’ Perspective, we need to filter all our tasks accordingly. Change into the ‘Context’ view in OmniFocus by either selecting ‘View > Context Mode’ from the menu or by pressing Command-2. The sidebar should now show you all of your contexts and the main content area all your actions grouped by context.

In order to apply the desired filter we need to active the ‘View Bar’ in OmniFocus. You can do this by either selecting ‘View > Show View Bar’ from the menu or press Command-Shift-V. The same actions can be used to hide it again. You now see a toolbar appear on top of the main panels in the OmniFocus window. It allows you to apply different filter, grouping and sorting mechanisms.

• Context Filter allows you to filter the context to which tasks have been assigned as shown in the left sidebar. You can choose between Remaining and Dropped contexts, where in Remaining you can further distinguish between ‘Active’ (contains actions), ‘Stalled’ (currently doesn’t contain any actions) and ‘On Hold’ (set on hold by yourself, e.g. for ‘Waiting-For’-like contexts)
• Grouping allows you to show tasks grouped in various different ways. Either by the context or the project they belong to, by their status (e.g. flagged) or by a lot of different time stamps (start date, due date, date added, date last changed or even date completed)
• Sorting provides more or less the same options, but this time for sorting your actions accordingly. The only additional option you have is to sort by the name of the task. Unluckily the sort direction is hard-wired in OmniFocus and always is ascending
• Availability Filter is a key filter as it, together with the Context Filter, really determines which tasks are displayed. You can chose either ‘Next Actions’ under ‘Remaining’, which gives you all first and available (not blocked) actions of all your active projects. Alternatively you can choose ‘Available’ which gives you all non-blocked actions, also the ones after the first action of your projects. Choosing ‘Any Status’ obviously gives you every single action completed or not, blocked or not across your entire library. Finally you can also chose ‘Completed’, which is nice for views that allow you to look back at what you have already achieved.
• Status Filter is the one which is most important to the Today Perspective as described above. It allows you to filter by various status combinations, e.g. flagged or not, due soon, due and not flagged, due and flagged and finally due or flagged, which will be our setting for the perspective we are building
• Estimated Time Filter allows you to further narrow down the actions displayed by the amount of time you have assigned to each of them. I typically do not consistently apply time estimates to my actions, but it comes in handy if you have 40 minutes at hand and want to see which things you can possibly completed in that time. Only issue with time estimates typically is that you always misjudge the amount required to complete a certain action (typically youneed 2.5 times more than you think

For our ‘Today’ Perspective, please apply the following filter settings:

• Context Filter = ‘Active’
• Grouping = ‘Context’
• Sorting = ‘Due’
• Availability Filter = ‘Available’
• Status Filter = ‘Due or Flagged’
• Estimated Time Filter = ‘Any Duration’

Tip: Once you have the ‘View Bar’ activated, it also allows you to change the width of the columns in OmniFocus and OmniFocus has it’s very own logic of doing this. Furthermore, by right clicking the column headers, you can also add or remove columns from the display. This is particular useful as perspectives, as one example, are able to remember the columns displayed as well as their width.

Creating your ‘Today’-Perspective

It couldn’t be any easier to create your own Perspective, but before we do this, we need to ‘clean-up’ a bit by hiding the View Bar again (‘View > Hide View Bar’ from the menu or Command-Shift-V’). All you now need to do is bring up the Perspective Window by either hitting Command-Control-P or selecting ‘Perspectives > Show Perspectives’ from the menu.

This window shows you all your Perspectives, or just the standard ones that come with OmniFocus in case you haven’t created any just yet. You can select them form this window, manipulated or delete them. But you can also add new ones, which is what we are going to do now.

Select the small gear wheel icon from the bottom bar of the window and choose ‘Save Window As > New Perspective’. OmniFocus now takes an exact snapshot of your window and the filter, group and sorting options applied and saves it as an accessible perspective. You can now enter a name for the perspective and I would recommend to chose ‘Today’.

You can ignore most of the options you have on the right-hand side of the Perspective window for now as I will explain them in future posts. The only two we want to look at is the ability to assign a different icon to your new perspective and the option to assign a keyboard short-cut to it.

Since the standard perspective icon of OmniFocus is not necessarily a beauty, you can click on the small little triangle bottom left of the icon to select one of the OmniFocus icons or simply drop any image on the icon box to use whatever you like. I love and use the WooIcons for my Perspective icons.

Recording a short-cut allows you to quickly access your perspective in the future using the keyboard. Simply click into the ‘Record a short-cut’ field and hit the keyboard combination of your choice. OmniFocus will automatically block keyboard combos already used inside the application from being recorded, but watch out you don’t chose any global keyboard short-cut. I settled with Control-0 to 9 to access my perspectives plus some Control and character combos.

Simplifying the Interface

At times you also want to use Perspectives in OmniFocus to hide things from the user interface you don’t need in a particular situation. For example when you are simply doing the things you are meant or want to do, you don’t need a lot of options to manipulate actions, projects or contexts. If you decided to batch process a few tasks belonging to one contexts, you don’t need the ability to navigate other contexts at that time and so on and so forth. Perspectives in OmniFocus luckily also restore the layout of the user interface if they are configured to do so. Don’t worry about this at the moment as it works by default, I’ll explain more about this in a later post.

For our ‘Today’-Perspective, we want this to be as simple as possible to get us really focussed on what’s on today’s menu and not start wandering around the task list and procrastinating on the actions at hand. The first thing we don’t need is the list of context in the left sidebar. The Perspective already shows us today’s actions grouped by contexts, so the panel on the left is somewhat redundant. Click the divider between the context list in the sidebar and the main context area and drag it all the way to the far left to make the list disappear.

The second step is to hide the toolbar, which you can either achieve using the top right button in the window, selecting ‘View > Hide Toolbar’ from the menu or by pressing Command-Option-T.

Now that we have changed the layout, we’d like to save these changes to the perspective we have created and that we are currently in. The good folks from OmniGroup have made this a straight forward activity by allowing you to take a snapshot of the current perspective, which automatically updates it’s settings. Simply select ‘Perspectives > Take Snapshot of Today’ from the menu and you have saved the simplistic layout of your ‘Today’-Perspective back to OmniFocus.

Accessing Perspectives

Now Perspectives would be as helpful as they are if you couldn’t access and switch between them very fast. OmniFocus gives you a fair amount of options to access the Perspective of your choice. Here are most of them:

• Select them from the ‘Perspective’ menu in OmniFocus
• Use any keyboard shortcut you have previously assigned to your perspective to access it
• Open the ‘Perspective’ window and double-click the perspectives to change amongst them
• Create a URL to call the desired perspective

While the first one should be straight forward and the second one has been described earlier already, I’d like to focus on the latter two options.

The Perspective window can be used to navigate Perspectives and by clicking the small ‘panel slider’-icon in the bottom window bar, you can reduce the size the Perspective window takes if you only need it to provide that browsing functionality.

Creating URLs inside OmniFocus (or other documents that support URLs) to access perspectives isn’t particular difficult either. The URL scheme implemented by OmniFocus consists of three simple elements:

• ‘omnifocus:///’ (Yes, three slashes) to call OmniFocus and tell it we want something from it
• ‘perspective/’ to access a perspective
• ‘Today’ as the name of the perspective we’d like to access. If the name of the perspective contains a space, use ‘%20’ to replace it in the URL

So to access our ‘Today’ perspective your would use the URL ‘omnifocus:///perspective/Today’. These URLs come in handy if you like to reference perspectives in other actions inside OmniFocus using the note field. My Daily Review as an example makes use of these URLs so I can quickly access the view in OmniFocus I need to look at. But even in other documents, say notes or mind maps, assuming the support URLs, you can make references to OmniFocus Perspectives in a fairly effortless way.

Let’s Button It Up

(Need to credit Merlin Mann, Dan Benjamin and the ‘Back to Work’-Podcast for the term used in the heading.) We should have captured all the basics of OmniFocus Perspectives in this post and you can go and create those perspectives you find useful for your workflow. Again, keep it down to those you really need. If you do not access a Perspective at least once a week, likeliness of you don’t really needing it is damn high. In the next posts we’ll have a look at further useful aspects of Perspectives, like grouping, filtering, focus, expansions, …

Meanwhile feel free to share how you use Perspectives in OmniFocus and what your favourite one is.

Joseph Wain has created a great icon set originally targeted at iOS developers, but Glyphish makes great perspective icons for OmniFocus as well. It ships free with 200 icons unless you aim for retina icon resolution and 80 icons more which requires you to put 25$ out (which still isn’t much).

I am already using the icons and am very happy with their slick and minimalistic look! Great work.

Perspectives is a well known feature in OmniFocus for the pros amongst you. What some (including myself) may only discover by coincidence is that you can actually create ‘saved searches’ in OmniFocus using the Perspective feature.

It is actually relatively simple:

1. Select the scope of your search: For example for entire OmniFocus library in ‘Planning Mode’ or a folder there in. You certainly also do this in ‘Context Mode’
2. Enter the search string you use on a regular basis into the search field in the toolbar
3. From the ‘Perspective’ menu select ‘Save Window As > New Perspective’
4. Now give the new perspective a suitable name
5. Done.

Every time you now select this perspective the search is executed and you get those projects and/or actions that match the string. Note fields also get searched so you could even do something similar to tagging using notes.

I use this newly discovered with Curt Clifton’s ‘Validate Next Action Exists’ script, which scans all active projects and marks those which don’t have a next action defined by adding ‘Missing NA’ to the project name. My ‘saved search’ perspective looks for exactly that string.