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After reading Ben Brooks’ recent post on OmniFocus start dates, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about how my personal usage of start dates has changed as my OmniFocus workflow has evolved over the years.
When I first bought OmniFocus, I never used start dates. I processed my daily to-dos by using a handful of custom perspectives1, flagging hot items, and setting due dates. In theory, this should have been fine, but when I asked myself, “what should I do today?” I was working way too hard to answer the question. The most obvious side effect of this era was due dates too often represented the days I aspired to get things done, as opposed to hard deadlines.2
Somewhere along the line, I began to use start dates as a way to define when tasks should hit my “to do” queue. My methodology during this phase was that a start date would represent the theoretical day that a task could be started, as opposed to when I was committed to starting it. This had the benefit of keeping the future stuff out, and then I’d surface the hot stuff from the currently available tasks by assigning flags or due dates in my daily or weekly reviews. For example, let’s say my task was to “call someone about something”. If I could potentially do that task on the day I created it (even if my schedule would most likely prevent me to do so), I would plug in a start date of “today”. Then when it became a priority, I’d flag it. I drove my workflow primarily with a single perspective that used a “Due or Flagged” status. This worked better but it still wasn’t as smooth as I thought it should be.
My final adjustment was based on modifying how I defined a start date. In my workflow today, start dates represent either the day I intend to complete the task, or the day I will evaluate when I am going to do it. The primary benefit is this has eliminated all of the cruft from my list of daily tasks. My daily routine is driven by a “Daily: Start” perspective which groups tasks by start date and sorts them by context. 3 If I don’t get to a task on the day it starts or if I decide it is not a priority anymore, I just defer the start date to the day I expect I will be able focus on it. If I’m unsure when that is, I typically defer the start date anywhere between one week and one month in the future, so I can re-evaluate it when I have a better view of my schedule.4
I’ve gone from never using to start dates to having them as the primary driver of my entire workflow. That said, the power of OmniFocus is it can be customized to your heart’s content, and this system is just what works for me. Your mileage may vary.
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I couldn’t even tell you how many different perspectives I used back then to isolate the most important tasks, I just know it was too many. ↩
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If you’re a GTD devotee, you’ll recall this is a big no no according to David Allen. See Getting Things Done for more on why. ↩
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This perspective is similar, but not identical, to David Sparks’ Today perspective. ↩
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I still use due dates, but there are a lot fewer of them because now they only represent hard deadlines – exactly what GTD says they should be. As for flags? I rarely use them except in one-off scenarios. ↩
I always enjoy reading what other people are AppleScripting as it usually gives me some ideas about how to better use my Mac. I use LaunchBar as my application launcher, so Brett Terpstra’s script didn’t directly hit the sweet spot of fixing a problem I had, but it did get me thinking about what I do when I want to hide the current application.
I didn’t have any tricks, so shortly after reading the post, I wrote this dead simple AppleScript to hide the frontmost app:
tell application "System Events"
set current_app to name of first process where frontmost is true
set visible of process current_app to false
end tell
Just as I was about to assign this to a FastScripts keyboard shortcut, it occurred to me that I was probably over-thinking it and OS X had to already support this functionality in some way, right?
A Google search later confirmed it: Cmd-H hides the current app, and for bonus points, you have Cmd-Option-H which hides all apps except for the current app.
Two great keyboard shortcuts I was previously unaware of. Thanks, Brett. It all started with your post.
Personally I use MobileMe, but if you are looking for a good discussion on all the solutions to sync Yojimbo across multiple Macs, this recent Yojimbo Google Groups thread is the one to read.
I’ve got to say that I love the idea of a marketplace for short, digestible content that is only as long as it needs to be. I just downloaded two Singles in anticipation of an upcoming plane flight.
Update (2011-01-28): Plane trip is completed, and I really enjoyed both of the Singles I read: Homo Evolutis and Beware Dangerism. I think John Gruber got it right when he said this could be Amazon’s app store for articles. It is a no brainer to shell out a couple bucks for good content.
Even though I have been lusting after a new MacBook Air since they were launched, I’ve held firm and decided to squeeze the most of out of my current MacBook1 for as long as I can.
My resolve hasn’t prevented me however from throwing some new hardware into the MacBook. I found a nice deal on a Kingston 128GB SSD last month, and I upgraded my machine.
I’ll quickly pile on what is now becoming the oft-repeated sentiments on SSD – it makes a huge difference, and I can’t imagine ever going back. My boot time is light years faster, I’ve yet to see a bouncing dock icon since the upgrade, and my machine is more snappy and responsive than ever before.
The biggest surprise though wasn’t the speed boost. It was discovering how lightweight I could operate my Mac and how liberating that was.
Instead of importing all of my settings via Time Machine or my cloned backup, I rebuilt the hard drive from scratch and only installed apps or restored data as needed. Now, I’ve settled in ~45gb of apps and data, and it feels great. I’ve got everything I need2 on the machine and have plenty of room to spare. I’ve also picked up more than a handful of new productivity tricks with OS X’s built-in apps and services since I have been adamant that I won’t install a third party application unless it is a must have.
I really have never felt better about the state of my Mac.
Delicious never seemed to live up to its potential and keep up with the pace of innovation on the web, but I still liked using the site. It was hard not to be nervous about it though given it seemed like it was always priority 999 in Yahoo’s web strategy. Between that feeling and my increasing trust issues with any service that is totally cloud-based1, I decided to abandon my use of it a couple months ago. Instead, I began to store all of my bookmarks in Yojimbo, and I can’t say I have looked back once.
When I made the move, I checked out a couple of the Delicious to Yojimbo scripts that are out there on the web, but I never did a full import of everything because the scripts only got me 90% of what I wanted. I have had on my someday / maybe list to write a better Applescript for the import, but haven’t done it yet. I suppose that just got moved up on the priority list.
That said, I’d recommend if you have anything on Delicious, you do what I did tonight and get a full XML dump of your Delicious bookmarks. It might take all of 60 seconds.
It’s pretty simple. Just drop into Terminal and execute the following command (replacing yourusername and yourpassword with your individual info, of course):
curl -u yourusername:yourpassword https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > delicious-bookmarks.xml
That will give you everything from your Delicious account in one XML file that can be parsed at will in the future.
I couldn’t be more excited about the update to Simplenote this week, and in recognition of this update to an already great app, Patrick Rhone asked us all, “What’s in Your Simplenote?”
Here’s my list:
- Notes I take during important phone calls.
- IP addresses, server names, account setup instructions, folder paths, and other miscellaneous “IT” configuration-related snippets.
- Quotes.
- Any piece of “unstructured” reference information that I want to remember that doesn’t neatly fit into 1Password, TaskPaper, a “document”, email, or contact management apps. This stuff is almost always one word, one sentence, or one paragraph in length.
- Useful snippets of Applescript.
- Travel confirmation numbers.
- Various reference lists that haven’t yet been promoted to my TaskPaper master “someday / maybe” or “lists” document.
- Blog post drafts.
- The draft of this list.
Great idea, Patrick.
Keith Peters compares the font rendering of a Kindle, iPad, newspaper, magazine, and a paperback book under a USB microscope.
I wonder how many years before e-ink becomes indistinguishable from paper media.