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.

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!

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Awesome article from Dumb Little Man with 18 great advises on working smarter. Review them all in detail in the original post, rate yourself against each of them and figure out where and how you’d like to improve in 2011!

1. Get clear on the objective
2. Create a vision
3. Take the 80/20 route
4. Go for high impact items
5. Create structures to maintain your flow
6. Stop being a perfectionist
7. Learn from others
8. If it works, stick to it
9. Ask for help
10. Cut out the fluff
11. Automate
12. Delegate
13. Outsource
14. Wait
15. Pick your battles
16. Always lookout for a better way
17. Stop when you are tired
18. Review regularly

This handy script by Yilei Yang and Mike Erickson allows you to “export” your actions from Omnifocus that have either start or due dates to iCal as events.

While Omnifocus allows you to sync your actions as ToDos to iCal, this script adds them as events to a pre-defined calendar which may come in useful when sorting your day by looking at the hard landscape.

Yilei’s version simply adds them to a pre-defined calendar while Mike’s version also adds alarms.

Note that this no full “sync”, but more of an export: Every time you invoke the script the calendar gets wiped and populated with a fresh export.