OmniFocus & GTD: Changes to Action Lists
When I’ve written previously, I talked about how I keep my views of my action lists organized by context. This was so that I could decide which context to put myself in whenever I had a choice in the matter. However, I’ve recently noticed that this wasn’t actually working for me, so I made a change.
The problem started when I spent a few intensive weeks not working out of my system (I had enough to do with my job that everything else was superseded). When I finally dug myself out and got back to my lists, things had gotten pretty out of hand. I did a through weekly review, filled in a bunch of missing projects, and sat down to get to work. As I started looking at my context lists, I was instantly overwhelmed. A half-dozen contexts with anywhere from a half-dozen to three-dozen items each… yikes! I kept scanning back and forth between the various contexts trying to decide where to start, and wasn’t really getting anywhere.
Fortunately, I keep all my projects organized by folders, the list of folders sorted by importance, and projects within each folder sorted the same way. This allows me to use the “Sorting: Project” setting in OmniFocus to get a list of actions more-or-less sorted by how important each is to me.
In light of feeling like I couldn’t choose between my various contexts, I decided to change my “Grouping” from “Context” to “Due” so that things with due dates coming up would float to the top, and everything else would be listed below with “Sorting” set to “Project”. Now, my list has a section for “Due today”, then sections for “Due this week” and “Due this month”, and finally one long section for “No due date” (the majority of items) sorted roughly in order of importance to me.
This has proven to be an immensely useful change. Now, I don’t have any hesitation about just picking the top thing of the list and knocking it out. There are still some times when the top thing in the list isn’t the best thing to do at the moment, but I usually don’t have to scan too far down before I find something that I should do, and I feel much better about what I choose to work on this way.
I’ve kept around all the same perspectives I described before, except the only difference between them now is which contexts they do and don’t include. That way, when I’m spending my hour on personal projects in the morning, I can switch to that context. Then, when I change over to professional projects, it’s easy to just hit a single button and switch over to a different set of available contexts.
