![]() They’ve wisely foregone Apple’s slow and cumbersome on-screen help and created their own. The Omni Group has responded with excellent documentation. They also get the ability to temporarily filter from view all but the selected projects.įor as thoughtfully designed as OmniFocus is, some time and effort is required to understand and take advantage of its deep feature set. Owners of OmniFocus Pro (a standard version is available for $40) gain the ability to create custom perspectives and access to a robust AppleScript library for automating and integrating with other software on the Mac. This approach takes the question of when to review out of your headspace and makes performing the actual review less onerous than it may otherwise be. Reviewing your projects is the kind of task that easily gets pushed aside day after day. Revise as necessary and click a “mark reviewed” button to tuck it away. Click the project name to see a compact list of its constituent actions. When a project’s review date arrives, OmniFocus adds the project to the review perspective in the left sidebar. OmniFocus’s new Forecast context neatly rounds up your future tasks and commitments.Įach project can be assigned a review interval-a repeating schedule you set to step back and look over what you’ve completed and what comes next. For as simple and even obvious as the forecast feature may sound, few other products so elegantly and succinctly marry “What is on my schedule?” with “What must I accomplish?” You can also shift click a date range on the sidebar calendar to see multiple dates in series. Clicking any given date populates a middle column with your list of actions and any events that appear on your iCloud or Google calendar. A number on each calendar day indicates how many actions are due. When forecast is selected, the left column gains a calendar showing the next 30 days. But the most innovative sidebar perspectives are the forecast and review modes. A sidebar on the left provides speedy access to various OmniFocus perspectives such as the inbox, project list, contexts, and flagged actions. While everything in one window isn’t a universally good idea, it is an apt design pattern for task management and well executed here. OmniFocus’s new look makes heavy use of the single-window experience popularized on iOS. Individual temperaments and predilections weigh heavily here, but I feel OmniFocus strikes the right balance. At a time when Apple Mail has seven different flag colors and even the humble Finder supports unlimited tagging, OmniFocus has taken the position that too much categorization becomes a hindrance to simply achieving the task. An action may be assigned to one project, it may have one additional tag called a context, it can be flagged, and it can have a due date and a start date (called the defer date in Omni-speak). Here the Omni Group has been wisely selective in its offerings. The Omni Group has responded with excellent documentation.Įach action in OmniFocus can be categorized in a number of ways. It’s a bit disappointing that there’s no way to embed things like due dates and project names in the emails metadata like these must be set manually after the action shows up in OmniFocus.įor as thoughtfully designed as OmniFocus is, some time and effort is required to understand and take advantage of its deep feature set. The email subject line becomes the action’s title and email body becomes the action’s notes. Upon request, an email address is generated for you and all messages sent there become actions in your OmniFocus inbox. Omni Sync service can add items to their OmniFocus inbox via email. It’s great when it works, but through no fault of the Omni Group, Services are not consistently supported among all applications. OmniFocus installs an OS X Service that can send the selected text and images from just about any application to the OmniFocus inbox as a new action. The window persists until you save or cancel your entries-a welcome touch when copying/pasting multiple items. A customizable system-wide keyboard shortcut will invoke a quick entry window for entering as many actions as you wish. You can, of course, create new actions from within the application itself. OmniFocus offers up a standard array of options for feeding the beast. Mac App Store link) is an appealing option if you’re willing to invest some time learning how it works.Įase of entry is crucial to any task manager-one simply can’t track tasks that aren’t in the system. In crowded and diverse field of possibilities, OmniFocus ( Everybody else needs tools and techniques for staying atop our tasks. ![]() ![]() Rare and revered is the person who can mentally track everything that must be accomplished. ![]()
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