Some random comments, as an OmniFocus user and an admittedly very new newcomer to GTD. What I describe below may be completely invalid, and I may not like it two weeks from now
, but it's different from your list so maybe it will spark fresh ideas.
So:
There's a lot of stuff on your list, to the extent that I wouldn't know what to do when faced with it. I don't like to see more than about a dozen actions when I'm actually ready to work and deciding what to do. Much of my time tweaking Omnifocus in the Weekly Review is spent making most of my actions disappear, so that I have a modest-sized workload for the day and week. I do this by making the actions not Available in various ways (discussed further down).
When this is done, my normal "work view" is Context mode, focused on my Work folder or my Personal folder, sorted by Due, filtered down to Available. This shows all available actions for the area of focus (Work or Personal) in one list. (I still have lots and lots of Projects, but that's for planning, not for working.) I use Due Dates only for actions with a hard calendar date, so I'll have an action or two in Today and Tomorrow, and most of the actions are in the No Due Date slush pile. My goal is to have not much more than a screenful of actions.
Some details of how I make actions disappear (unfortunately all very OmniFocus specific):
- Whenever possible, I try to make projects Sequential and choose the appropriate and meaningful Next Action. A good Next Action is of course good practice. However, I'm also motivated by the desire to be sure that I'll know what the ramifications are if I look at that Next Action sometime during the week, decide that it's laughable to think that I'll get anything done on that project, and make the whole project disappear from my Work View by setting a future Start Date on the action.
- In order to worry less about putting off whole projects, I put time-sensitive actions that don't seem to fit into the project flow into a Next Action List called Administrative. So even if I put off Widget Project until December with a Start Date, the action "Prepare budget status report for Widget Project", which is due on October 14 whether I like it or not, goes into Administrative with a Start Date of, say, October 8. And since this one has a real hard due date, I'll give it a Due Date, something I try to do very sparingly.
- So at any given time, a large percentage of my workload is put off with Start Dates. Using a Start Date instead of On Hold means that the project will pop up again without any action from me, in case I slack off on the Weekly Review.
- However, any project that's just "think about it" is put On Hold. I don't want it popping up at all, until I consciously decide to activate it during a Review.
- After all this, in my Weekly Review, I go to my Work View and still see a long, long slush pile of actions, many of which for one reason or another I'm not going to work this week. I can hide them one by one with Start Dates, but as I see patterns in this "action clutter", I restructure my actions and projects and contexts to declutter it.
- For example, I put work backlogs and other work that's suitable for lists into Single Action Lists named after the backlog or work - Widget Documentation Backlog, Account Activations, To Read, To Write, To Learn, etc. The items in these lists are all placed in a context named "List", and that context is set On Hold. This makes all of those items disappear from the Work View, but I can still add all kinds of detail to these items as part of my planning. All of the lists are in a folder called Just Lists, to distinguish them from the folders that contain real projects.
Then I insert a pointer to these backlogs into my Work View by creating an Available action. For example, I might have an Action called "Activate three items from the Widget Documentation Backlog", with an active Context, a Start Date on Friday, set to repeat once a week.
This action comes up on Friday, and I consider it. If it's realistic to think that I can get the work done, I'll go to the Widget Documentation Backlog and change the Context for three items to an active context. This makes those three items appear in my Work View as actions, and since my Work View is quite sparse due to all of the things that I've made Not Available, I'll notice them.
I don't know how GTD this is. So far, I don't have any real Project at all. I could, I suppose, have a Project called "Work off backlogs until empty", and another called "Keep up with repeating tasks", each of which would contain several repeating "Activate" actions of the type that I describe.
- Of course, Context is also intended to reduce action clutter. This doesn't work too well for me, because when I'm working I can generally do anything in any work context, but I do have a few contexts for rarely-available situations that I set On Hold, to hide those actions until I can work them. I've also tried grouping contexts based on how often they go together, but I'm not happy with that yet.
- Oh - and- I don't use iCal for date-specific actions. I may sync with iCal, but I keep all actions in OmniFocus. I don't want to have to look in more than one place, and I really want to see those hard-date actions at the top of my Work List when they become active.
I'm not done tweaking yet, but I know that a long, long list of actions and/or projects, was not working, and my short list of actions (with a long list of projects that I mostly see when planning and reviewing) is working some, so I declare that to be progress.
Gardener
