#Omnifocus setup examples upgrade#
#Omnifocus setup examples software#
#Omnifocus setup examples mac#

Things that cannot start before a certain date – such as regression testing an upgrade that is due to happen.Things that have to finish by a certain date – I rarely assign due dates to tasks as it’s implicit from the sprint commitment.There’s no point attending these a day early, or a day late.

Ones that have to happen only on a certain date – i.e a meeting.In the case of time sensitive inputs there are 3 kinds to think about: This actually illustrates an important concept wrt GTD – the time I identify a task is completely de-coupled from the time it’s appropriate to do it. There is no point starting before a certain date, so I assign a start date of the Monday following the upgrade. Sometimes there will be something that happens on a specific date, in the example given here, an external vendor completed an upgrade over a given weekend, requiring our team to regression test it. Flow 2 – dealing with time-sensitive input I actually have a dummy project of ‘Sprint Misc’ for things that are on the radar for a two week block, but have only one step. If you assign a date to something it, that should have meaning.Īlso remember here the definition of project as ‘anything that takes more than one step to be done’. Obviously we’re all working to deadlines, but the calendar should be sacred territory in GTD. I categorise it according to the project that it belongs to and convert it into a task for OmniFocus.Ī word here on precise date – by this, I mean that it doesn’t have to be done on exactly that date, just as soon as possible. So I quickly scan the email, work out that I need to do something but there’s no precise date on it. The most common flow of all – you have something to do, but it will take more than 2 minutes.

Flow 1 – processing something for dealing with later Let’s move onto different use cases and how they relate to our sprint. This corresponds to the trashcan you see in the original diagram on the top right.

When you’ve identified this the item will never be relevant to you, then you eliminate it.

This relates to “Do It!” on the original workflow diagram.

The action can be done, there and then, in under 2 minutes – in this case the overhead of processing and retrieving isn’t worth it.

In some cases though, when you wouldn’t process something.

The bin if they’re neither of those things.

FreeMind if they’re not actionable but useful information.

Initially our projects are empty, but as we process different inputs we’ll see that change.įreemind is just a simple supporting document, with the 3 projects: Understanding GTD Inputĭuring our fictional sprint, we can get input from a variety of sources:īut they’ll all end up in one of 3 places: I have stripped OmniFocus down to show just a view where we have an inbox and a sprint with 3 projects. Our Simplified Sprintīefore we can start using GTD ® in a sprint, let’s look at our current setup for the next 2 (fictional) weeks. But we’ll just focus on two systems for now. There are definitely more places to store reference data (the file system and email to name but two).

A tool to support creative thinking and reference info, this is where a mind-mapping tool like Freemind comes in.įor the purposes of this example, we’ll only use these to tools to distinguish between a workflow tool and a tool for reference data.

A tool to capture the day-to-day workflow, this is where OmniFocus comes in.

The point is there are two kinds of tool: The choice of tools is a matter of personal preference, although I found OmniFocus fits my needs.

#Omnifocus setup examples mac#

Different Tools for Different InputsĪs I use a Mac at work, I’ve opted for OmniFocus and Freemind. A reminder of the classification system we’ll use to organise anything and everything. Some of the data with actual people’s names etc is blurred out, but the underlying principles will still be apparent, each kind of ‘external input’ will be translated into a GTD input.

#Omnifocus setup examples software#

The purpose of this is to show how the principles of GTD can apply to a software development. So here, I’m going to go through an example of using GTD ® in a sprint.