GTD approaches this in two important ways (among others):ġ) Giving you the confidence that you have everything “captured” in a system that you trust to keep track of it all so you don’t have constantly to feel like you have to keep everything in your head. List-keeping logistics are important-and OmniFocus is very useful in this regard-but if the underlying goal is to make your work life more pleasant and less stressful, a bit more nuance is required. If you’re just borrowing ideas from GTD here and there, like the idea of grouping your to-do lists by context, you’re missing almost everything GTD has to offer, which is a terrible shame. If you’ll permit a TNG anology: the difference between Warp 1 and 2 is of an altogether different magnitude than between 9 and 10. The difference between 99% and 100% implementation is truly vast, as anyone who has made it to 100% readily attests (David himself included). Moreover, the system pays most of its psychological benefits when it’s implemented fully, and I mean really nitty-gritty, every-little-thing-in-your-head fully. GTD is about psychology, not “productivity” per se.
The great achievement of David Allen’s framework has more to do with relieving stress about work than organizing your lists, a fact that is seemingly lost on most of the GTD-professing masses who spend all day twittering about lifehacks and Moleskine list-management. But as is to be expected with the Internet and human culture in general, the popular conception has missed the point entirely-or, rather, gotten it almost entirely backwards.
What I have since learned, however, is that the payoff is very much worth the effort.Ī lot of attention is paid around the web to GTD as a “list keeping” system-as something that has primarily to do with keeping track of lots of little mundane life details.
#Omnifocus gtd software
The learning curve for OmniFocus is honestly far steeper than with any other piece of desktop software I have ever used.
#Omnifocus gtd manual
I will add, however, that it wasn’t until spending a few hours slogging through the manual that I finally “got” this about OmniFocus, and frankly I can’t imagine anyone else just downloading the software, playing around with it, and making it their primary productivity tool spontaneously. It renders elegant and easy elements of the GTD workflow that were previously either cumbersome or completely impossible to do properly with a paper-based system (or, worse, a system based on a hack of an existing piece of software built for another purpose). It wasn’t until much later when a chance frustration with the weight and drudgery of my own makeshift pen-and-paper GTD implementation drove me to give it another try that I learned precisely how amazing an implementation of David Allen’s system the folks at OmniGroup had ultimately come up with.
#Omnifocus gtd full
I futzed with for a few minutes, realized I didn’t have a full week to spend learning a piece of software that seemed to make a simple task more complex and didn’t allow me to sync my data across computers, and I gave up.Īs syncing and other improvements like increased clarity of features and flexibility of configuration options and the ability to customize the appearance of lists came along, OmniFocus was already dead to me.
#Omnifocus gtd how to
In its tiny default font and weird spacing, it presented the user with an empty list and almost no guidance on what the program does or how to use its amazingly complicated array of options for every conceivable combination and permutation of projects, lists, children, parents, siblings, start dates, dependencies, etc. Perhaps this was due to the seeming eternity the notional app spent as vaporware, but I think it was mainly my bafflement at first opening the program shortly after its beta release. Though I have been hard-core enthusiast and sometime black belt of GTD since around the age of 20 (i.e., nearly a decade), I’ll admit to having had a certain initial reluctance and skepticism about OmniFocus.
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