![]() I’ve included a task in my daily evening routine that directs me to the review perspective to make sure its cleaned out just like the inbox. So like I mentioned, I’ve carefully made sure that projects whose “theme” is to appear the next day, magically appear in the review perspective today. Regardless of your mental approach to determining when a single project should be reviewed, I think the gang at Omni felt the same way with regard to having to review lots of projects in a single sitting when they created the “Next review” setting and reviewing perspective. ![]() To that end I’ve started giving each day of the week a “theme” in which categories of responsibilities/projects fall into and used that to determine when and at which frequency a project will get reviewed. In fact, I’m starting to conclude that there are categorizations of responsibilities not necessarily projects that need to be reviewed on a periodic basis. ![]() In fact, the realization that not every project should be reviewed that frequently has been one of the major changes I’ve implemented in my personal workflow. Yes, not all of those need to be reviewed on a weekly basis. See a strictly pure “Weekly Review” of 150 some odd projects is simply daunting. And that brings me back to the weight of it. Now, I’m not sure about you but I’m pretty sure the number of projects in my OmniFocus database is near the 100-150 mark. In order to make progress, one needs to review them on some “trusted schedule” such that we know the work will eventually hit that “Today” perspective. Those typically involve projects, which more often than not get grouped into folders representing those responsibilities. While I’d love to lock myself in my office and tinker with my raspberry pi until I’m sick/bored with it, the world doesn’t really work that way. I know, your asking well why was that? I thought you said you’re a long time user OmniFocus, which somewhat implies being an über OmniFocus know it all? … yeah well bugger off! … Actually it has nothing to do with finding the magic combination of settings that generates the “one perspective to rule them all!”. One of the revealing parts to this experiment was the identification that certain projects had no chance of getting tasks added to the “Today” perspective, because of flow. But it’s allowed me to look very closely at how a task or project makes it’s way through my system. I was already off the band wagon right? So not really much to lose. Every project, context and perspective (outside of the stock ones) were deleted, wiped clean or reset. Yes, you read that correctly…From Scratch. I then archived my entire OmniFocus database and started over. I also re-read Creating Flow with OmniFocus by Kourosh Dini. To start, I went back and re-read Getting Things Done by David Allen from cover to cover. So recently I decided I really wanted to crack this problem for good as my life just feels out of control when I’m “off the bandwagon”. Many times it comes back to the efficiency of the system and it’s inability to keep up with what is an every increasingly fast paced world and our desire to make sure that “nothing slips through the cracks”. Those that I’ve discussed this issue with at length seem to all agree as to root cause. ![]() One recurring problem/theme is this issue of “falling off the bandwagon”. Many of us are moving into new positions within our corporation and it stirs discussion and debate on personal to-do tracking and general productivity. Many of friends and colleagues are as well. I’m a long time user of OmniFocus and even longer GTD practitioner. If you don’t want all the back story just jump to the last paragraph. I’ll try to get to my “ask” as quickly as I can. Sorry for what is likely going to be a very long post. ![]()
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