OmniFocus

Getting the right things done Franklin style (almost) using OmniFocus

Posted 17 Jan 2009 by Laura Scott

Task management can be a challenge if you have a lot of stuff going on. "Urgent" things are always distracting you: the phone rings, colleagues interrupt you, a client asks for help, emails, newsletters, snail mail, IMs, Tweets....

You could be buzzing like a bee, getting a whole lot of things done, but not getting done the right things.

I would love to be using a Franklin-Covey Planner program on my Mac, but they don't make one for Mac. So the choices are:

The anti-priority dogma -- er, canon -- of GTD and OmniFocus

Posted 2 Jul 2007 by Laura Scott

So I've been playing with OmniFocus alpha to see if it can work for me as a personal productivity/task manager, but as I noted before, the system lacks a way to prioritize tasks. It seems rather obvious to me that you want to identify the important must-do items before you start filling in your day. I could spend all day answering the phone, reading and writing emails, catching up on my feeds, having meetings, doing conference calls ... and not getting done the things that need to get done.

Efficiency is getting things done. Effectiveness is doing the right things.

Apparently, despite a hopeful comment from Ethan Schoonover, there seems to be little hope that prioritization will appear in OmniFocus. I'm only digging into this now, but a discussion thread on the topic revealed a dogma about the Getting Things Done "canon":

OmniFocus: Getting Things Done, laundry-list style

Posted 1 May 2007 by Laura Scott

If only life were this easy. Kinkless' Ethan Schoonover gives us this video preview of OmniFocus, which looks to be a pretty nice little app.

The thing that gets me, though, is that OmniFocus does not seem to provide any way to prioritize tasks. To be fair, there is a simple project setting where you can designate that all tasks must be done sequentially, but that's not the same thing as true prioritizing.

I assume this is because the Getting Things Done system does not provide for prioritization. I don't know. I've not read the book and don't plan to. I've got a system. I just don't have the software (no thanks to Windows-centric Franklin-Covey).

The idea behind prioritization is that not all tasks are alike, and to-do lists can become run-on laundry lists of everything to be done under the sun without some prioritization.

My system is fairly straightforward: