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.

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.

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:

1. Notes I take during important phone calls.
2. IP addresses, server names, account setup instructions, folder paths, and other miscellaneous “IT” configuration-related snippets.
3. Quotes.
4. 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.
5. Useful snippets of Applescript.
6. Travel confirmation numbers.
7. Various reference lists that haven’t yet been promoted to my TaskPaper master “someday / maybe” or “lists” document.
8. Blog post drafts.
9. The draft of this list.

Great idea, Patrick.

There is a very fine balance point of maximum effectiveness between simplicity and complexity of systems. How much detail, how much cross-referencing, how much coding and categorizing is enough, without becoming too cumbersome? Most of what’s out there to help is grossly overbuilt. Once you realize that you only need to define your projects with the next actions on them and keep track of all that in a complete but simple set of lists, you won’t need to bother yourself with much else. You’re better off being a good carpenter with a simple, well-balanced hammer than a novice with a garage full of unused power tools.

– David Allen, David Allen Company Email Newsletter July 19, 2010

I started a pretty serious test-run this week of TaskPaper as my GTD app in place of OmniFocus, so reading this in David Allen’s email newsletter today could not have been more timely.  While it’s still too early for me to say for sure if I’m sticking with it, the allure of TaskPaper is exactly what David Allen talks about above.  It gives you exactly what you need, but nothing more.

Side note: The simple act of writing this short blog post has invoked a subconcious fear that Merlin Mann will come out of the woods running and screaming that I need to stop talking about switching productivity apps and do something meaningful.

So I got thinking. How did I develop the basic skills I have right now? Mostly by copying heroes. When you’re fresh starting out, you have no fear of diving in and copying something directly. It’s like playing guitar. When you start playing guitar all you want to do is play the first verse of your favorite song. Big success! You don’t need to write the next great guitar symphony or a hit single. It’s totally satisfying to learn to play something somebody else can already play. And you get better by doing it.

Basically this is exactly what I am doing right now by emulating John Gruber‘s technique of creating a quoted linked list post for a piece of content that I liked.

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I can’t believe I’ve been using 1Password for who knows how long and did not realize there was a keyboard shortcut to autofill your saved 1Password logins.  I always assumed that since there wasn’t one listed under the 1P menu, it didn’t exist and was a miss by Agile Web Solutions.  Well, I will never doubt them again.

The shortcut is Command + \ by default, however it can be customized to whatever works for you within the 1Password Preference pane.

Killer time saver.

One of the nicer discoveries I had today was that the iPad supports the Safari Bookmarks Bar.  This means you can create both bookmarklets to extend the functionality of your browser and bookmark folders to group common browser shorcuts.

It’s very easy to set up, you just have to go to Settings > Safari and then set “Always Show Bookmarks Bar” to “ON”:

Now you can add bookmarks directly to the “Bookmarks Bar” folder in Bookmarks:

Then you can add any bookmarklets you wish to the bar, and create bookmark groups right on the bar just like you do on the Mac.  For example, you can see I’ve added Instapaper’s Read Later bookmarklet below and created two bookmark groups:

Enjoy!

If there is one truth I have learned in my short time in this world, is that there are filers and there are pilers. Most people are very squarely one or the other.

I’m most definitely a filer.

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You can quickly open the first nine links on the Bookmark Bars of Camino and Safari by hitting Command+1 through Command+9. Editor’s note: This is quite useful, especially if you use bookmarklets that do things, like send the current URL to Tweetie for sharing on Twitter or save the page to Evernote.

I knew about this keyboard shortcut, but it is a great suggestion to use it for faster access to bookmarklets.  I just rearranged my Safari bookmarks bar this evening with this in mind.

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Ok.  Last one (for now at least!).  Here’s the syntax to put in a LaunchBar search template for Twitter’s “Find People” search:

http://twitter.com/search/users?q=*&category=people&source=users