“I don’t have time for that!” I would think. I used to balk at this idea of a weekly review. This is not something I need to do right now, but I don’t want to forget about it, so it lives in my “Home” area and I’ll set a date for it down the road (more on this in the “weekly review” section below). For example, I have a task to replace the spare tire in my car. These tend to be lower priority things that I want to do someday, but there’s no rush right now to get them done. I have a task where I keep my daily standup notes and that alerts me at 10am each day, right when the standup starts.Īnd then there are things without dates. Of course there are also tasks I do that are time-sensitive, and those get timed alerts. An alert that goes off at a random time today is not useful here. The dev is going to work on the changes tomorrow, so as long as it’s today, then I’m all good. I have a task today for work called “Give feedback for test mode ticket” which I need to do today, but it doesn’t really matter if I do it at 8am or 9pm. One thing I really like about Things over OmniFocus, which I used before this, is that I can assign tasks a due date without a time associated with it. Due dates mean that I see what I need to do on specific days whenever that date hits (duh). I tend to live my day-to-day in the “Today” view of the app, which predictably shows me what I have to do today. You don't have to do this, but it helps me a ton. Oh, and as a rule I give all projects an emoji to help pick them out of a list quicker. I could theoretically have a project for “Chores” or something, but I just assign it to the Home area and consider that good enough. For example, I have a task on my list today to clean up the shoes by our back door. These can either be finite projects that will come and go, or they can be ongoing things that will never end.Īll tasks get assigned an area, but not all tasks get assigned a specific project. So for example, “Release Notes” is a project under my Work area, “Shopping List” is a project under my Home area, and “Birch Bark” is a project under my BirchTree area. Freelance (any work I’m doing on the side)Įvery single thing I want to do falls into one of those areas, and if I ever make a task that needs something else, then I’ll simply make a new area.BirchTree (blog post ideas, podcast schedules, YouTube posting steps, etc.).Work (all the stuff I do for my employer).Home (things around the house or just things I need to do for me/family/friends).Morning (things I need to do before the rest of the day).An “area” is where a task falls in my life. First of which is an “area” (I think OmniFocus calls these “Contexts” but they’re the same thing). After the Inbox (Areas and Projects)Īfter a task is put in the inbox, it needs a few things to escape.
#Omnifocus priorities mac
The Mac app even has another command (Ctrl+Opt+Space) that does the same thing, but pulls in the website you’re currently looking at in your browser, which is really nice for saving tasks with linked web pages. It’s very quick on the iPhone and iPad, and the Mac’s Ctrl+Space shortcut is hugely useful. Since I add so much, it needs to be simple and quick. I also value being able to add to the inbox easily. Sometimes I’ll often triage throughout the day, but there is a repeating task at 7:30am each day to make sure that everything is out of my inbox and somewhere else. I add things to the inbox when they come up and then I have a recurring task set up to triage my inbox every day. The inbox always baffled me, but last year I finally read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and it clicked for me.
For reasons I’ll get to soon, Things has some features that make this very easy to manage. I typically have 15-30 tasks to complete each work day. Some people like to set higher level tasks and have like 2-3 todo items per day, and that’s a valid system too, but it doesn’t work for me. I find this frees up space in my brain to not think about what I have to do at any given time, I can just refer to my system and do what it says. This means everything I need to do in the future, and I do mean everything, gets logged as a task in my task manager. First things first, I am a strong believe in the idea of “offloading your brain” into a task management system.
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