I’d read some posts lately (OmniGroup Blog, OmniGroup Blog, Kourosh Dini) of getting started with productivity and task management so I thought it might be a good idea for me to write out my thoughts and put my system into words. I think my theory is that I should be able to explain my system to someone else or it isn’t simple and sensible enough.

I’ve always secretly wanted to be an organized, productive person but I’m actually trapped in the body of a lazy person. For years I’ve frequented the productivity blogs such as Lifehacker and 43folders looking for little nuggets of information hoping that I might just get lucky and stumble across productivity. That I’d find the magical tip or trick that would solve all my organizational dilemmas and turn me into the person I wanted to be.

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It doesn’t quite work like that.

There’s a phrase that the GTD community uses, “Pushing the peas around on your plate”. I realized that all this time spent on productivity blogs and playing with every task management software that came along was just an effort to avoid eating my vegetables, to avoid doing my real work. It was meta-work, I was working about work. Now part of what led me to this realization was Merlin Mann’s epiphany about his own blogging and internet habits. If I was going to be the organized and productive person I wanted to be I’d have to really take some initiative and do some real work. I grabbed my copy of GTD and started reading it again when I had time and listening to the audiobook while going to sleep, so essentially reading it twice. With my new determination and motivation some of the ideas started to make sense to me and applications started to come into focus.

Starting GTD

The ideas that really reached out and grabbed me from GTD are:

• Ubiquitous capture - Capture everything, all the time. Don’t leave anything in your head to slow you down.

• Contexts - You don’t need to know what you’ve got to do at home while you’re at work. If you don’t have access to a phone then you don’t need to see a list of phone calls you need to make. Setting contexts is an incredible way to pare down your task list to something manageable, it helps you stay motivated, and it can really help you chew through common tasks (keep making phone calls while you’re in phone call mode).

For me the ubiquitous capture device that made the most sense was my phone. There’s almost no time I’m without my phone and it makes a pretty decent input device. For awhile I used OmniFocus and Things in parallel trying to decide what I liked more but eventually settled on OmniFocus for it’s better more usable contexts.

OmniFocus Setup

I went through quite of bit of experimenting and rearranging to get OmniFocus to where it is now. OmniFocus has something called “Perspectives” which are essentially a bunch of settings for the things the window will show. I’ve got a series of perspectives that link to a set of contexts for various functional locations. At work I have access to my Office, Online, Mac, Phone, Email, and People contexts. I can’t do anything at Home, School, Errands when I at work. So when I’m at work I can just click my Work perspective and it sizes the window and selects the contexts that are available to me. Same thing when I’m at home or school.

Next time I’ll go into more detail and cover how I use my iPhone…

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