On episode 12 of the Nested Folders podcast, Actions vs. Reference, I mentioned a shortcut to create projects in both Agenda and OmniFocus. This is awesome, because it allows me to have complementary and align organizational structures for both action/task management and reference material.

Here is the proof of concept Shortcut, Project Maker, which creates a project in OmniFocus and task to review and add to the project (which links to Agenda), as well as a project in Agenda with a note that links back to OmniFocus.

Certainly, this could be expanded by tying in input from your workflow as the project, defining more tasks/note content, and specifying folders/categories for projects to be placed in.

How might you improve this Shortcut?

In an upcoming post, I will share my current folder/category structure as a way of documenting how I decide what projects go where. I’m looking forward to it!

I had a blast writing about Shortcuts with OmniFocus 3.4 last week, but based on reader Jason Clarke’s feedback, I think it would be good to round out my Daily Journal Shortcut with a bit more detail, as well as a second partner Shortcut that leverages it.

My Daily Agenda Journal Shortcut (based on the Daily Journal Shortcut I shared last week) connects OmniFocus data (due/overdue, flag and available, and Forecast-tagged and available actions) with calendar and weather data to create a note in Agenda.

What I love about using Agenda for this is that the way its x-callback-urls are constructed (making and opening notes based on titles), I can know the URL to open a given note before I even make it.

With that in mind, I also have a Today Shortcut, whose sole job is to open today’s entry in my daily journal in Agenda for referencing throughout the day. This is a great way to make sure I am maximizing the value of the journal entries.

Thanks to Jason for the feedback, and hope this extended version of the Shortcut is valuable for all!

It’s day five of my series of posts about the wonderful addition of Shortcuts automation in OmniFocus 3.4 for iOS, and I’ve saved the big one for last. Today’s Shortcut is something that is, for me, a really useful tool for creating an ongoing diary of my life.

This Daily Journal shortcut creates a rich text (from markdown) summary of the day, including:

• weather conditions and high/low temperatures
• OmniFocus actions due (or overdue) today
• OmniFocus actions which are flagged and available
• OmniFocus actions which are tagged with the forecast tag and available
• a list of calendar events
• a list of all-day calendar events

I have this outputting markdown and rich text to make this easily extensible for storing the output (I send everything to Agenda, but it could go to any variety of apps that can get content from Shortcuts.

I want to thank Alex Hay, author of the Toolbox Pro app with Shortcuts actions and the Snapshot Journal. His dictionary actions to replace weather conditions with the right emoji were what I used here, and the work he’s done is brilliant.

And that’s the series! I’m a huge fan of the work the OmniGroup has done to enable automation of OmniFocus and create more utility for its content, and have had a blast writing about and sharing some of the ways I’m using this. I’d love any and all feedback about these posts or how you’re using Shortcuts with OmniFocus!

Missed day one’s Shortcut? Check out the Boss Review here.

Missed day two’s Shortcut? Check out the Project Markdown Table here.

Missed day three’s Shortcut? Check out Today’s Actions here.

Missed day four’s Shortcut? Check out the Inbox Processor here.

It’s the penultimate post in this series of Shortcuts for OmniFocus! For day four, I’m serving up a bit of a turkey of a Shortcut.

I’m highly distractable, so even when I hide the panes of OmniFocus on my iPad, I still know they’re there. This is why I built the Inbox Processor shortcut.

This, one by one, serves me up my inbox items from OmniFocus so that I can process and organize them in to their proper spots.

The catch here is that Shortcuts can’t modify OmniFocus content, so this is making new actions out of inbox items. As such, I need to delete inbox items after I’ve gone through this, and I need to go through the whole thing or else risk losing where I was at.

Likely, the real utility of this one is limited, but I wanted to share it anyway because it feels like one of the more creative ones I’ve done, and it might spark ideas for others around how it could be modified.

Hope this is helpful, and that people can also find ways to expand it!

Missed day one’s Shortcut? Check out the Boss Review here.

Missed day two’s Shortcut? Check out the Project Markdown Table here.

Missed day three’s Shortcut? Check out Today’s Actions here.

Carrying on with Shortcuts sharing in support of OmniFocus 3.4, this one is a quick reference progress tracker.

The Today’s Actions Shortcut adds up due/overdue tasks for the day and reports back how many of them have been completed. It also demonstrates using multiple Find Items actions, and how their results can be counted and calculated.

This is a good one if you try to avoid notifications/badges, or for Siri help with if the screen with badge isn’t visible. Weirdly, though, I think the grammar variants were the hardest part of this.

This Shortcut helps me manage towards my bookends, as Rosemary Orchard and I discussed back on Nested Folders episode 3: Building Bookends by giving me a quick snapshot of where I’m at.

Hope this is helpful, and that people can also find ways to expand it!

Missed day one’s Shortcut? Check out the Boss Review here.

Missed day two’s Shortcut? Check out the Project Markdown Table here.

It’s day two of sharing Shortcuts that take advantage of the new OmniFocus 3.4 capabilities, and this is another one that helps me share the content with others that has historically been just in OmniFocus with others.

The Project Markdown Table Shortcut showcases how the Find Items action results can be retrieved on a per attribute basis. It takes these attributes for each action in a selected project and organizes them in to a markdown table for email sending to anyone.

Of course, that text could be shipped or shared in any kind of way, but this is what I use it for mostly.

Much like yesterday’s post, this helps me follow through with some of the things that Rosemary Orchard and I discussed on Nested Folders episode 7, How to Do Productivity with Others (Who May or May Not) by letting me use my system but also share its content.

I hope this is useful to everyone!

Missed day one’s Shortcut? Check it out here. Interested in seeing some other kinds of Shortcuts or have other Shortcuts you’d like to share? Would love your comments and feedback!

There’s a new release of OmniFocus in the world, and does it ever bring some powerhouse features over for dinner. With support for native dark mode, iPad multiple windows, and new context menus for quick actions, there’s a lot to enjoy.

The part that brings the most versatility, though, is the new expanded support of Shortcuts with Shortcut Actions. These enable everyone to be able to automate and expand what is possible with OmniFocus without having to know complex code.

To celebrate this, I wanted to share five Shortcuts I have made for use with OmniFocus 3.4, one each day over this week’s weekdays. Some will be useful right away, others might need to be customized a bit to really be useful to you, but I hope all can spark ideas about how all this new capability can be used.

Let’s get right in to day one, then!

The first Shortcut I wanted to share was also the first one I made, because I saw the immediate utility of being able to take OmniFocus data outside of OmniFocus itself.

With a shoutout to The Boss Review, an older post on my blog, here is a Shortcut I also call Boss Review that drafts an email to someone with a list of actions tagged with a particular tag. I can use this to prep my boss for our reviews by sharing a bullet list of all available actions tagged with her name.

This Shortcut is a pretty straightforward application of the Find Items action, which feels to me like the real hero of this release.

This helps me follow through with some of the things that Rosemary Orchard and I discussed on Nested Folders episode 7, How to Do Productivity with Others (Who May or May Not) by letting me use my system but also share its content.

I hope this is useful, and I’ll be back tomorrow to share a second shortcut!

On lucky episode 7 of the Nested Folders Podcast, Rose Orchard and I discussed how we “do productivity” with others who might or might not, and a lot of this really has to do with communication.

One thing Rose brought up was the importance of meeting notes and sharing them, so I thought I’d post about how I do this with Shortcuts and Ulysses.

I have two Shortcuts that I use. The first (aptly called Start Meeting) sets me up with a Ulysses sheet that guides me to take notes, capture actions, and record agreements.

The second (reasonably called End Meeting, and run by sharing markdown text from the Ulysses sheet) takes those notes and sends them to the attendees, ensuring everyone has access to my perspective of what just happened, and might also share theirs.

I'd love feedback or improvement ideas for these Shortcuts and this workflow!

On this week's episode of the Nested Folders podcast, Rosemary Orchard and I discussed automation as a solution, and when it should be employed.

We didn't really answer the question, but I think we shared a lot that one could think about when considering the prospect of automation. Also, I wanted to share the couple of Shortcuts I have that take care of my favourite annoyances.

1. Strip Formatting: this shortcut takes the clipboard, gets the text (only) form the input, then copies that text back to the clipboard, thereby removing any formatting.
2. Telescrum: my team at work works in agile, and we sometimes conduct our daily scrum via Slack if there are conflicting events or only few of us around. This shortcut grabs my calendar for the previous work day and today and creates a list on my clipboard that I can paste in to our channel (no direct Shortcuts to Slack integration yet). This probably needs some editing to work for you, but is hopefully inspirational.
   

I'm looking forward to sharing some more Shortcuts soon, just as soon as soon as a few app updates ship publicly. 😉

On this week's episode of the Nested Folders podcast, Rosemary Orchard and I discussed our approaches to reflection and review of our productivity systems.

One of my keys here has been taking the traditional Getting Things Done weekly review checklist, and splitting it in to two parts:

1. Reflection Friday: doing the Getting Clear portion in its entirety, and then doing the calendar review parts of Getting Current to ensure all things I might capture in my system are well-inventoried. The goal is to make sure I have a current capture of all the things.
2. Executive Monday: inspired by David Kadavy's Prefrontal Mondays, this part of my review completes Getting Current and Getting Creative and Courageous by taking a more executive-level view of lists, projects, and actions to decide what I do about all the things I've captured. This is 100% decision-makign time about what I focus on, defer, delegate, delete, rename, adjust, etc.
   

This has been hugely helpful for me - what are your practices?

I also want to quickly give a shoutout to James Dempsy and Jean MacDonald and their The Weekly Review Podcast, which not only gave this an anthem (I hear the song every time I say the words), but also a lot of awesome and robust thinking on this topic. Great stuff!

On this week’s Nested Folders podcast episode, Rose and I talked about when not to be productive. In thinking about this even more, there’s a second quote from the Merlin Mann interview with David Allen that I really like, which is to have a great list of things to have in order to procrastinate with. That is, stuff you can do to “safely” avoid doing other things.

This is where some of my favourite lists come in. I thought I’d share them here, along with how I use them:

• Books to Read: I always include the reason why this is on my list (where I saw it, or who recommended it), and why I thought it would be a good go-to. This keeps better context about why it's on my list, and who to thank/blame later.
• Curiosities: Articles of interest, YouTube videos, or other bits of media that I think would be of interest or good to learn from in a time-killing kind of situation.
• Ping: A group of recurring actions to remind me to reach out to people I don't interact with regularly to keep our connections going. Catching up with friends is a great way to be unproductive.

Earlier this year, I had the great pleasure of working with Tim Stringer of Learn OmniFocus to present my workflows and OmniFocus set up.

It was an amazing experience, and I wanted to re-share it for everyone’s consumption. As always, I’d love to hear feedback, as I love learning from all the other contributors to Learn OmniFocus and the OmniFocus community writ large.

Note that the links I've used to Learn OmniFocus are affiliate links. My session was done before I was an affiliate, though, and I'd happily promote this either way. They're awesome and absolutely worth checking out.

Interested in hearing more?

I have partnered with the wonderful and talented Rosemary Orchard to co-produce the Nested Folders Podcast!

We share our thoughts on productivity topics, hope it's helpful to listeners, and would love everyone's feedback!

After several months of discussion, planning, preparation, and writing, I am so proud to announce that I have partnered with the wonderful and talented Rosemary Orchard to co-produce the Nested Folders Podcast!

We’ll discuss all manners of productivity topics, mostly centres around philosophies, techniques, and approaches, so that listeners can benefit from our experiences, regardless of apps or systems they might use.

We’re just starting out, and no doubt we’ll iterate and improve, but I am very excited to share and learn through this new podcast, and would love to hear any and all feedback from everyone!

Also, a huge thanks and shout out to Josh Hughes for the amazing cover art. Love this!

My system has been broken. Not broken in the way that the mechanics of it don’t work, but broken in its content. Here’s what happened:

I had an OmniFocus inbox of about 40 items. For a week. And I didn’t touch them. Why? Because 40 is a lot. 40 is many. And like everyone, I have a lot to do, and getting to clarifying and organizing that stuff just couldn’t make it to the top of my attention. But I hate baggage like that.

Finally, on our about day 8 of this inbox (now more like 50), I rolled up my sleeves and I got to sorting it out. And a funny thing happened.

As it turns out, all of the actions here were totally valid things I could do, and maybe even some I ought to do, but in reality, none of them were meaningful enough to actually do.

The good news, then, is that I made good choices by ignoring this pile that had been yelling at me. The bad news is that I let that pile exist in the first place.

I think the problem is that, with digital systems in particular, it’s easy to add content. There’s no significant time involved to add items (heck, I can automate the creation of many), and there are no real storage limits. With no cost or barrier to entry, it’s really easy to pick up “I mights” and “maybes”.

My solution? Digital bankruptcy.

For a period of about a week, I went back to paper. Not because I don’t love my digital tools, because I do, but because I wanted it to be hard to take on work. If I wouldn’t be willing to write it down, why would I be willing to do it?

This really worked. I have taken on way fewer things, and done more and better with the really important stuff. Having a greater sense of what this should feel like, I am moving back to digital, but carrying with me some of the analog parts to keep inbox down.

I should say, too, that I discovered this wasn’t just an inbox problem. I was allowing way too many bodies of work in to my world, thinly spreading my attention across many projects, being massively distractable, and less available to others. I don’t blame the tools, this was a discipline problem, and I needed help to regain that discipline.

I unhesitatingly recommend The Bullet Journal Method, by Ryder Carroll. If you use a paper system, this is a fantastic approach. If you don’t use paper, the philosophies, ideas, and ways to approaching work and life are valuable for consideration in any tool sets. I’ll be rapid logging in a notebook rather than pouring everything I might passingly want to do into my action inbox, for example.

So this is my summer theme now, almost a little Jerry Maguire: fewer projects, more attention. Few people get remember Ed for the many things they did; it’s the things they did really really well that leave a mark.

A weekly status review on projects with one’s boss tends to be part of having a job, and I was recently asked about how I use OmniFocus and Agenda for this process. It was a great question, because it made me think about my workflow so that I am optimizing for both:

1. Simplicity - having the right amount of detail and ease of execution
2. The audience - making sure my workflow makes it easy for my boss to consume the content I’m offering up

This isn’t super tricky, but it does require some thoughtfulness to make sure that I’m not optimizing for one at the expense of another.

The key ingredients here are my apps of choice:

• OmniFocus
• Agenda
• Calendar (I use the stock app)
• iOS Shortcuts

I’ve broken up my workflow into the following five steps, which I think get me to a positive place for overall outcomes:

1. Create the list of things in OmniFocus: I start with what I want to review by having a perspective in OmniFocus that includes specifically chosen projects:

2. I copy the projects to be discussed: Using my OF perspective, I copy the projects to discuss with my boss:

   [video width="750" height="1624" mp4="[heyscottyj.com/wp-conten...](https://heyscottyj.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/OF_select.mp4)"][/video]

    

3. Convert this OF list into a text list: I use this iOS Shortcut, into which I paste the copied OF into for conversion to a nice text list (copied to clipboard). It includes only project names, as I’d like the discussion to be what shares appropriate detail, and not the list itself. I just want this to be a stage-setting of topics.
4. Paste this new list as an agenda into the meeting calendar event: By putting this content in to our calendar meeting request, I can be assured that the content is in the most appropriate place for both of us to reference before and during our meeting.
5. Create a note in Agenda: I create a new note in Agenda and link to the meeting with my boss. This gives the note the appropriate time/date, a bit of a temporal audit trail, and sucks in the agenda (pun) that I put in the calendar request as a framework for me to take notes against.
6. We hold the meeting: I refer to my OF perspective with the projects worth talking about, using those projects’ actions as context (ha) for the discussion. I make notes of what we talk about in the Agenda note, and identify follow-up actions in the note as checklist items.
7. I process the meeting: Running my favourite iOS Shortcut, I process the notes I took into OF as actions to follow up on and into an email to my boss so that we have a shared understanding of everything discussed. It also gives my boss an open platform to correct anything I might have missed or misunderstood.
8. I do the actions I said I would: Because commitments.

We’re well in to January, but it’s still resolution season, right?

Every year, around this time, I resolve to lose the weight I’ve gained since my twins were born, and every year I… don’t. This year, things are different.

Sure, it’s easier to focus on me now that the twins are almost ten and the little guy will turn five in the spring. Really, though, the eight years of not accomplishing this goal means experience has taught me some things about goal setting:

1. Habits are hard and take time
2. Goals are ideas, not actions
3. Success can’t be measured annually

So what was holding me back?

Action. Like, real planned action.

I have realized that an annual goal or ambition is too vague. It doesn’t mean anything here and now. It suggests I could get to it more next week. Or next month. Or whatever, I’m hungry.

My answer: fifty-two projects. Not one epic year-long project to attack this monolithic goal, but a project for every week.

Why? Because action.

Thinking of what I want to be at this year’s end might be great visualization, but it doesn’t tell me what I should be doing right now. A week long project, however, does, especially if each week has its own success criteria.

Seven days isn’t that far out, and having fifty-two goals instead of one forces me to think about what I can really do, and what choices and plans I can make to be successful.

Every week spells a new project in OmniFocus (but any task management system will work, if it works for you). I don’t make a repeating project, because I need my actions to be purpose built for and achievable in a specific week. If I have more meetings or am away or the weather is going to suck, I have to design actions that will fit.

The only repeating action is the weigh-in at the end of the week, and the updating of a spreadsheet to measure the overall.

The spreadsheet identifies:

• my starting weight
• my goal weight for the week
• my actual weight at week’s end
• a five star rating for the previous week’s activities I might typically do
• a column for notes looking back at the week to track lessons learned and insights

In action, I’m doing more than I’ve ever done before, so I expect the results will follow as I keep at it. If nothing else, I’m measuring and learning all the way.