Things I Like

Better spam filtering?

Seriously, though… I’d recommend you apply the GTD workflow to the individual emails. Start by deciding how far back any email could possibly still be relevant and delete everything older than that.

Next, read each one quickly and simply decide whether any action is required. If you take 10 seconds on each email just to make that one decision, you’ll be able to identify all the actionable ones in a few hours. As you read through, flag / star / move each actionable email to a folder or whatever works in your email set up. Just be sure to get them out of your inbox. Delete everything else. Your inbox should now be completely empty.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re finished. Next, go back through the actionable emails and just finish anything which requires just a quick reply or some similarly quick and simple action (i.e., apply the 2-minute rule from GTD).

What’s left represents your actual work. Set aside some time every day to work down the list of items and knock them out. At this point, I’d be surprised if you had more than a a few dozen emails remaining, so it shouldn’t be too daunting.

Going forward, adopt the same process to all incoming email so that you wind up with an empty inbox several times a day.

I think it would be a bit much to list all of them, but I can give you a quick idea of what I do. For example, I have a “Home” perspective which is set to the context view and which has all of the contexts which I can possibly be in when I’m at home. I add a button to the toolbar for that perspective so that whenever I sit down with my computer, I can click a button and see everything. Then, I can un-select contexts which currently don’t apply.

For example, let’s say my Home perspective has my “Computer”, “Wife”, “Desk” and “Chores” contexts selected. That means the main right-hand view has all of your actions for any of those contexts visible.

Now, let’s say my wife is out of the house. Of course, that means I won’t be able to do any of those actions. So, I un-select the “Wife” context and all of those actions are hidden, leaving me with just the actions for “Computer”, “Desk” and “Chores”.

Hope that helps!

I’m afraid I don’t know anyone who offers lessons specifically on OmniFocus, although there are a lot of very knowledgable people out there! Perhaps he would do best by attention a day session with the David Allen Company (www.davidco.com). They have a number of instructors and do both public sessions as well as 1:1 tutoring.

All you need to do to use a context in a perspective is put OmniFocus into context view, and then use control-click to select and unselect the contexts you’d like to see. Once things look just the way you want, save the perspective. Then you’re free to set things up for the next perspective and save that one. If you want to re-use one of the contexts in multiple perspectives, just keep it selected in both.

I think GTD is particularly well suited to people whose ability to concentrate is fragmented for any reason. Apart from needing to spend some concentrated time once per week to thoroughly review your system, you break down tasks into small, easy pieces, and spend most of your time working from that list. It also gives you a way to record what you’re doing so that you can move from task to task without forgetting where you are. I highly recommend picking up a copy of the book (or audiobook if that’s easier) to get the real, in-depth explanation of the system.