Creating Flow with OmniFocus

An amazing guide to how to use OmniFocus. Perfect for after you have read David Allen's ‘Getting Things Done' and would like to apply those methods in a sound way.

This book introduces you to the application, and slowly builds up your abilities until you feel comfortable and ready to ‘create flow'. Through use of some very clever perspectives, the author imbues the reader with master level skills and relates it all to everyday life. His background as a psychiatrist really proves useful in how he relates GTD to the mind.

An absolute must read if you want to, or do use OmniFocus.

This book has been pretty massive for me.

I bought OmniFocus over a year ago and struggled with it based on David Sparks' excellent screencasts [Link]. For some reason, it just never integrated its way into my life, other than to give me weekly reminders to put the kids' pocket money into their piggy banks.

I know that I need something in my life to help me deal with my stuff, and I knew that OmniFocus was more than capable of doing that. I just found it so overwhelming!

I listened to the author talking to David Sparks on an episode of Mac Power Users [Episode 78], which is when I learned that he'd written a book about how he used OmniFocus. My interest was piqued once again.

So, I watched DSparks' screencasts again and then bought Kourosh's book. A few of my Twitter contacts had read it and recommended it, so I knew it was worth my while.

Observations
Firstly, I must say that the application is so feature rich and flexible that teaching someone how to use it is no easy task. All one can really do is explain how they use it and hope that that helps.

Kourosh certainly has a system in place for working this app!

His background as a psychiatrist undoubtely gives him knowledge of the human brain that can be applied to OmniFocus. And he does do that, with explanations of procrastination and why we do it, that sort of thing.

Templates
The explanation of template projects was executed flawlessly and highlights the power of OmniFocus in a way that I would never have imagined. So much is covered in that one section of the book: sequential vs parallel projects, putting projects on-hold, grouping tasks, keyboard shortcuts. In short, I found this to be the most valuable section of the book.

Perspectives
This section was difficult to take in, particularly the core perspectives section. I don't know if it's just me, but I read the descriptions of setting up the core flagged and core start-date perspectives twice and I'm still not sure that I get it. Giving options is probably useful for a lot of people, but I found it confusing. I'd rather he'd just said ‘here's what I do now' and explained that, rather than going through how he got there. Now I've got two core perspectives, neither of which I really understand, so I will undoubtedly have to read this section again.

That said, I knew as soon as I started reading those parts that I'd need to come back to them. It is my intention to use the app for a month or so, see how I can tweak it when I understand it better and then come back to those sections in the book again.

The tickler and due perspectives in particular are ones I'm having trouble understanding. Where the tickler is concerned, I don't think it was explained very well at all. I think I understand it, I'm just not sure how to set it up.

And the Running Projects was also troublesome. Is it actually called that, or is it called 30k feet? There was some inconsistency in the book and it is that that had me feeling confused.

Pomodoros
This was a fascination section and one which I will need to consider. Of course the danger here is the rabbit holes. Maybe I could devote a 25-minute pomodoro to investigation the rabbit holes and learning bits here and pieces there about how to tweak my project managing!

Conclusion
As a reference book, this will be invaluable to me as I learn the app. It is jam-packed with information and the short-cut keys were repeated over and over, which I found very helpful. The appendices contain yet more useful info, so just when you think you're nearly done, there's more!

But I feel that some things could have been explained a little more clearly, i.e. the instances mentioned above. That is why I gave it 3 stars.

And my final gripe? Please stop writing GTD with the registered trademark symbol. It's extremely distracting. Sure, do it the first time, but after that, we already KNOW.

Grrrrrr.

Now I get Merlin Mann's funny little ‘davidco 2001' thing.