Need to do some last minute holiday shopping? I know I do. Thankfully, I have a workflow for how I approach gift giving, powered by OmniFocus.

I wrote earlier about how I use OmniFocus for organizing my holiday experience, but in response to a reader question, I thought I’d expand on my gift management workflow.

I know many aren’t fans of keeping checklists or “non-tasks” in OmniFocus, but for me, I find a lot of these sorts of things become actionable over time, so having such things stored in OmniFocus is valuable.

Examples of these lists are:

• Gifts
• Things (like gifts, but for me)
• Books to Read
• Food and Drink to Try

Throughout the year, I collect ideas in these lists as actions, usually tagged Someday/Maybe (which puts them on hold) and with the name of the intended recipient. For bonus marks, I might also add a note of where/why I heard of this as well as where to find it. For books in particular, I like to also note who recommended it (so that I can thank or blame them later).

This creates a great inventory of ideas. As events come up (birthdays or holidays), I can look at those lists, remove the Someday/Maybe tag, and assign the actions to a new project that it could belong to (such as “Christmas Shopping” or “Wife’s Birthday”).

As I move these actions, I can add “Buy” to the action’s name, and then tag it with an Errand tag (with location perhaps). If an online purchase, I can use the same action to track the order and shipment, too (with a Waiting For tag and a link to the shipment tracking).

Having a bank of potentially actionable ideas that I can then turn in to actions in the appropriate project has been a boon to my gift-giving game. What do you use to track ideas and purchases?

In a previous post, I wrote about my iOS Shortcut that connects Agenda to OmniFocus. With thanks to everyone for their questions, I wanted to follow up with some additional details around how I use the Shortcut and what my workflow is like.

This is all surrounding the fact that I attend a lot of meetings, so the goals here are to:

1. set myself up to take good meeting notes
2. store these notes for later reference
3. peel out and handle the actions arising from the meeting
4. share all of the above with the other attendees

I’ll start off by making a new note in Agenda and linking it to the appropriate meeting in my calendar. This brings over text from the event that might be relevant, and also gives the note a temporal assignment (my favourite part of Agenda is how things get dated by when they happen, and not necessarily when they are created/edited).

During the meeting, I take notes as bullets, and identify actions as checklist items:

At the end of the meeting, I use the Share function to send the Markdown (this is a premium feature of Agenda) to my Process Meeting Notes iOS Shortcut.

This does a couple of things:

1. It creates a project in OmniFocus called “Complete Actions from ”, including each action in the note and an additional flagged action (Review these actions for contexts, due and defer dates, or other needs) to draw my attention to the project:

   

2. It starts an email to whomever I like, using the title of the note prefaced by “[NOTES]:” as the subject line. The body of the email is the notes but with action items (and completed actions) grouped under a heading:
   

   

Also, I meet all four of those goals with one note and one Shortcut. Not shabby.

It’s that magical time of year where I have to shovel my driveway four times in one weekend, but it’s so worthwhile, because I’m cozied up by the fire now while the outside is blanketed in beautiful snow that reflects the lights my neighbours have hung with care.

Also, there’s a bajillion things to do. How does one cope?

I thought that, for both my sanity and for the purposes of sharing, I’d break down my holiday construct in OmniFocus.

Now for our household, holidays means Christmas, but this kind of systemic thinking can, I’m sure, apply to any major holiday or event. I don’t mean to be exclusive if I refer to Christmas; I only refer to what I know.

For me, the first step is to break down my projects. I think it’s probably tempting to have a Christmas 2018 project, but I’ve found that to be inadequate - there’s just too many outcomes dancing in my head for one project to track. I have identified these projects for myself, and for each, I’ve included what that project tracks:

1. Christmas Decor for Home
   • Making room for seasonal decor and putting that out
   • Building/crafting new decor elements
   • Buying new decor elements
2. Christmas Dinner
   • Things to buy for hosting/serving
   • Turkey management (that’s a five day brine, yo)
   • Tracking Waiting On actions for pot luck participants
3. Christmas Gifts and Shopping
   • Leveraging my regular single action Gifts project
   • Things to buy and for whom
   • Actions to research ideas, prices, and vendors
   • Waiting For deliveries
4. Christmas Card
   • As we make our own, actions for photo shoot
   • Design and editing
   • Logistics

For better focus (ha) and organizing, I’ve got all of these projects lovingly nestled all snug in a custom perspective like so:

The actual path for these projects is living inside my Personal folder as, though I considered a Christmas folder, my folder structure is pretty sacred territory (read: I like to keep my number of folders to a minimum). Grouping together in a folder instead of using a perspective might be just what you need, though. I think the key is being able to see all these projects and actions thematically together.

Now, I am equipped and ready to face this season. All my actions are organized, and can use the regular Tags of my system to be presented to me in other appropriate lists (like Waiting On/For lists or To Buy lists or Errands lists).

All my actions. All many of them. Better get to work.

I’m a meetings guy. Largely not by choice, but a lot of my work day is meetings.

One of the biggest traps of meetings is that, unless they are very well facilitated (spoiler alert: many aren’t), it gets really easy for agreements or commitments to be made but then later lost or never acted on.

After all, saying stuff is easy.

I’ve found just the right solution to this that works for me, though, and so I wanted to write about it.

It was only a few months ago that I discovered Agenda which, after I’d spent a great deal of time looking for a solid note-taking/storing app, was a great relief.

Agenda’s main conceit is that each note belongs not only to a project (which in turn belongs to a category for organization nirvana), but can also be linked to a date or specific calendar event. In this way, content is searchable by topics and times, giving me multidimensional control over how my content is arranged.

Moreover, Agenda, though it writes in its own kind of editor experience, can export content in Markdown, making it wildly recyclable and reusable.

All of this adds up to my ability to take great thoughtstream-based notes that link to meetings that clearly identify notes and actions/commitments.

The magic happens, though, when I share Markdown from Agenda to this iOS Shortcut I built. That shortcut takes the Markdown from Agenda, identifies lines that are actions, pastes them to OmniFocus (since they get converted to TaskPaper format), and then organizes an email I can then send to all participants.

In this way, I can store content for later reference in Agenda, track the actions through OmniFocus, and create a trail of agreement by sharing all of this.

So as easy as it might be to say things, this means everything said really means something. Nothing lost, nothing left behind.

And that’s something.

One of the marquee features of OmniFocus 3 is the move from Contexts to Tags. I adore this capability, but I think it introduces a lot of questions:

How do I use this? Do I worry about how many Tags I have? In what ways should I apply those Tags to actions?

Now everyone’s answer to this will be different (which is wonderful, and demonstrates the flexibility of the software here), but I wanted to share my own experience.

As I wrote about with my adventure in naming the Forecast Tag, words matter. A lot. Where and how they are applied matter just as much.

Initially, I considered Tags to be like metadata. And, like metadata, the more the merrier, since it’s very little overhead, and allows for greater searchability. This is all true, but I started finding I had nonsensical-looking actions, because Tags were defining too many things:

Draft the storyboard Build TPS Report • Call   Susan   Meeting   Planning

Aces for searchability, thumbs down for this being a very natural way to craft things.

The more I thought about Tags, the more I also thought that Tags, for me, are not a criteria, they’re a list. In other words, my actual usage of OmniFocus taught me that what I really want to see are lists. And yes, one can build all kinds of amazing and capable advanced perspectives in OmniFocus 3, but more often, I’m clicking a Tag to show me all the Email I need to write, or all the things that concern Susan.

Once I came to that, I was able to delete a bunch of Tags, and also redefine Tags to have more apparent meaning.

Now, of course I still multi-tag actions. My favourite use case for this is my expansive list of People subtags (each the name of someone I regularly interact with), along with the action or state. An example is:

Find out what Jordan's gift ideas might be Christmas 2018 • Waiting On   Frank

In other words, I like to have Tags that make sense not just as criteria or metadata, but as lists.

Tags are also a great way to hack the state of an action. I have several Tags, for example, which have an On Hold state, and so therefore take actions they are assigned to out of my actionable pool. Such tags include Someday/Maybe, Monitor (for actions I don’t have to do, am not necessarily Waiting On, but wish to watch), and Reference (yes, I know that OF should be for action and not facts, but checklists, when applicable, benefit from having some reference material close by). As before, these can also make compelling lists based on just one Tag.

What are your thoughts on using Tags? How have you adopted and adapted this feature for your workflows?

Special thanks to Josh Hughes for his amazing iconography that is part of my everyday OmniFocus experience!

I was recently asked by a colleague how I approach the development of new strategies or processes or products. Essentially, how do I start to create a something that isn’t an evolution of something that is, but that is new?

In business, this is a tricky one, because not only would I need to solve this for myself, I’d also need to know how to convince others of what I’ve come up with and recommend. Going from “what if…” to having an actual plan about that is not a simple play.

Research is obviously the first part. Who wants this? Why? What have others done elsewhere that’s maybe similar? Who can I talk to about about this? And so on. But I think we intuitively knew that already.

The complicated part is approaching what to do with the massive onslaught of information that research will provide. Finding information is going to be easy, but managing it into a proposal or an idea or a story? That’s complicated.

My favourite tool and approach here is to find a place for all the bits that will inevitably come in. This not only groups things for clarity later, but it also forces me to consider what a bit of information even is.

The categories I find helpful:

• Facts: these are pieces of information that are true, verifiable, and replicable by others. This can also be a bucket of verifiable things that aren't true (i.e. it is a fact that x is false).
• Assumptions: often masquerading as facts, these are findings that are thought to be true, or which represent information that will be used in the absence of other information.
• Opinions: research means engaging others, and explicitly separating opinion from fact or assumption is valuable. Bonus marks: these give hints on how to sell you ideas later.
• Ideas: like opinions, but less rooted in evaluations. These may also be my own, but are also good insights to my audience later.
• Questions: this is a running log of open questions, and is typically added to as the other things sort (i.e. I this is a fact, and that is an assumption, then what is the other fact?)
• Next Actions: coming out of all of the above, having actions is vital so that I know what I will do as more information comes together and is clarified to fill in the initial void.

How do you like to approach planning around new things? I’d love to hear about it!

Two maybes make a probably.

I’m going to write a bit more about the Forecast and Forecast Tag in OmniFocus 3, because I think it’s just a plain great thing.

One thing I have found about the Forecast Tag is that it will show in the Today view of Forecast, even if it’s deferred until later.

In some cases, this is super handy (knowing a thing is coming up this afternoon even at the beginning of the day saves me from being surprised later), but in other cases, it’s a bit cluttery.

I have, for example, a repeating project on weekdays called Morning Routine, which walks me through the things I need to make sure I remember to address during my hectic mornings (arrange tasks for the day, check to see if I need to sign any forms or homework for the kids, review chore charts, etc.).

Now, I could have this project due, but to me, that badge is sacred, and this is routine stuff. So no. Not due. The Forecast Tag is perfect for this, though. At the same time, however, that becomes an automatic twelve things right there all mucking about with my ability to see the other Today things (also, twelve feels like a lot of things, even if they’re tiny).

My solution? Forecast-Tagged things do not show up if blocked, since that view can’t know when something will become unblocked. This is where Action Groups (which I’ll be writing about soon) and serial projects come in: by making something (like my morning routine) serial (even if it isn’t actually a serial project in a strict sense), I can hide and then progressive show all the next actions about that routine. True, it forces me into doing them in a particular order, but a couple of tweaks and tries, and that’s just fine.

As always, your mileage may vary, but this could be a neat way of tidying and leveraging the Forecast Tag and its view.

What are your great Forecast tricks and strategies? Please comment and share your wisdom!

In the physical world, things have names for a few purposes:

1. Common language
2. Identity or brand
3. Relative reference

In the digital world, though, a name may be the only attribute a something has, so changing its name does change what it is.

The point of all this? I’ve adored the OmniFocus 3 Forecast Tag since its being introduced as a feature back in early beta. Having a prescribed list of things show up in the Today view of Forecast is incredibly powerful, in that it allows me to look at thing list of things I’m interested in seeing alongside calendar commitments and things I have to do because due.

I had a massive struggle, though, in determining the name for this tag. Because the name, it turns out, is everything.

Seemingly logically enough, I started with the tag name of Today. This was problematic, though, because since these things aren’t due, the don’t have to get done today; I just want to see them today. As such, if I got to the end of a day with three (or more, I’m being kind) of these “Today” tasks left, I’d feel guilty. Ending a day with a feeling of failure instead of accomplishment is the exact opposite of productivity.

Thinking I would solve the problem with the new tag name Next, I got back to work.

Except.

The word “next” means… next. So if I have ten of these, which is actually next? Or next after that? Like, next next, or next?

Awful.

After much soul searching and a tip from a friend, I renamed the tag ☆, and haven’t looked back. Because it isn’t a word, it has no meaning, nor does it imply anything other than what I give it to mean. I interpret ☆ as “show on my Forecast perspective”, and nothing more. I have found this very liberating.

Maybe I overthought this. Or maybe words in some contexts mean more to me than they ought to, but I found my way through to feeling accomplished about what I do again, isn’t of bad for what I haven’t.

The last few weeks of my career have been tough. Like, really tough.

We’ve all been through this. Those busy times where a project is launching but also it’s emotionally charged and also your kids have parent teacher interviews and also you’ve got a home to keep on top of and a life you want to live.

It’s not simple.

But as I write this, I am deeply grateful for both Getting Things Done methodologies and OmniFocus, because they, together at the centre of the massive storm of work I’ve just come through, made everything possible. Capturing my inputs, clarifying their meaning, organizing the outcomes and commitments in to a system I can then review and engage with not only kept me sane, but made me successful.

With all of this in mind, I’m excited to use this platform to start sharing the experiences I’ve had and knowledge I’ve collected over the last decade plus of GTD use and the last five years with OmniFocus. I’ll probably write about other productivity-related things, too. Who knows.

I’m not entirely sure how this blog will unfold or what it will become. I only know that writing this post was my next action to getting going. So here it is.

Tick.