OmniFocus Perspectives Redux: People & Meetings

We looked at Planning and Doing so far and all of these Perspectives work very well as long as you are in control. Things tend to get a little more messy when other people or organisations get involved. If you need someone else to complete a particular action before you can proceed or discuss a problem with another team across the organisation, you need to plan, do and track in a slightly different manner.

This is why GTD® implements two Contexts which deal with exactly these situations: “Waiting For” & “Agendas”. Implementing them in OmniFocus looks straightforward on the surface, but actually is not. If there is one aspect even power users struggle with than it is related to how they managed “Waiting For” and “Agendas”. The reasons being very practical ones:

1. “Waiting For” needs to be a Context which is set to a “On Hold” status because the tasks captured here are not actionable and consequently should not show in your normal “Doing” Perspectives — thus removing clutter — and need to block any subsequent tasks in sequential Projects or Action Groups
2. “Agendas” should be an active Context since it will contain agenda items you can and want to raise with a particular person or in an upcoming meeting (even though you may decide to defer an action until the date of the next conversation or meeting)
3. Although one is “On Hold” and the other active there is a overlap between both Contexts: Both deal with people; When you talk to John you want to raise that question you noted down, but (maybe) also remind him of the report he owes you

In some OmniFocus setups you will find several “Agendas” Contexts nested below a master “Agendas” one. Very often these represent individual people you work or live with and sometimes standing meetings like your weekly project status update meeting, your Daily Scrum or your monthly management meeting.

While this looks useful and logical on the surface, it further increases the difficulty in OmniFocus to get all items related to a person or a meeting — topics or delegated tasks — into one place.

Structure vs. Search

This is why we will implement a very different structure with our “Waiting For & Agendas” Perspective which is actually called “People”. Your milage may vary depending on what your work environment looks like, but for many 10 direct coworkers and at least the same amount of stakeholder — whether customers, business partners or other teams — is not a unusual number of people you deal with during the course of a normal week. In addition you may find that there are people you deal with more intensively on a temporary basis, e.g. for a single project. Creating and maintaining (!) 20–30 “Agenda” and “Waiting For” Contexts, two for each person, is not really practical. Since we need agenda items in an active Context and “Waiting Fors” in an “On Hold” Context creating one single context for each person or meeting is not feasible either.

The proposed solution looks messy initially, but hang in there. We are going to create a single “Waiting For” and a single “Agendas” Context and will tie them together in the “People” Perspective. The search function in OmniFocus will clear the perceived mess eventually.

Laying the foundation

Making the “People” Perspective work requires creating these two simple Contexts first. Switch into the Context Perspective (⌘3 or by selecting “Contexts” from the Perspective menu) and

• Create a Context called Agendas by pressing the “+” button at the bottom of the sidebar, no additional configuration required
• Add a Context called Waiting For the same way, but this time open the Inspector ( ⌘⌥I or by clicking the big “I” icon in the toolbar) and set the Context’s Status to “On Hold”

At times you may have agenda items that do not directly relate to a project. This is often the case when you have regular 1.1s with either members of your team or your manager, but also for standing meetings like business reviews or board meetings. For those it is recommended to create a Single Action List, e.g. “1.1s” or “Quarterly Business Review”, and assign the newly created “Agendas” Context to it as the list’s default Context. This is entirely optional and you should skip this step if you do not have this particular use case.

Capturing Waiting Fors and Agenda topics

In order to make the setup and the “People” Perspective work any “Waiting For” or agenda item needs to include the name of the person, team or organisation you have delegated to or that you need to raise a topic with. Some examples:

• Waiting for Jean to come back re mistakes in Paris expense report
• Discuss FY15 planning timeline with leadership team
• Waiting for Plumper & Sons to come back re spare tube for bathroom
• Ask QA team about new test cases for data entry
• Review school vacation schedule for holiday planning with Maria

Using TextExpander snippets as a way to speed up capturing can be considered a best practice when you implement this Perspective setup. You can have fairly simple snippets which you could also setup using iOS built-in keyboard shortcuts instead:

• .wf expands to Waiting for_
• .tcb expands to to come back re_
• .d expands to Discuss_
• …

Note that “_” marks a space in these snippets to ensure your typing flow is not interrupted. You can also setup more sophisticated “Fill-in” snippets with TextExpander. Below a “Waiting For” snippet which could be invoked with a trigger such as of.wf

Just copy and paste the below into a new TextExpander snippet

Waiting for %filltext:name=person/event% %fillpart:default=yes%to come back re %filltext:name=subject%%fillpartend% %key:tab%%key:tab%%key:tab%wa

These little snippets will help you significantly to capture tasks in such a way that they support the “People” Perspective principles and hence simplify your setup.

Note: The above Fill-in snippet assumes you are capturing in either OmniFocus Quick Entry or the OmniFocus Inbox. The three tabs at the end move the cursor into the Context field where the “wa” string is pre-loading your “Waiting For” Context. Modify the snippet to match your setup or usage.

Creating the “People” Perspective

After all the theory and the preparation it is time to setup the actual “People” Perspective which is a lot simpler than you might think. Start with selecting “Add Perspective…” from the “Perspective” menu.

1. If you plan to use the Perspective often it is recommended to assign a keyboard shortcut to it, e.g. ^P; A nice icon might be a good idea as well; The example uses the OmniFocus 2 Perspective Icons by Josh Hughes
2. Select “Don’t use project hierarchy” in the Project Hierarchy section as we want to focus on items in specific Contexts
3. In the Presentation section you have different options for grouping Actions: You can group by “Project” if that is how you want to view topics in a meeting, but choosing “Ungrouped” or “Context” is recommended
4. Sorting Actions by “Due” provides the most value as anything that is due or even overdue will pop right to the top of the list
5. In the Filtering section you want to filter status by “Any Status” and by “Remaining” in terms of availability so all “Waiting For” and “Agendas” items show up (even when coming from the “On Hold” Waiting For Context or if deferred to a future date)
6. Leave the remaining Filtering settings as per default: Duration equal to “Any Duration” and Contexts as “Remaining”
7. While the Focus section is not relevant for this Perspective the important bit happens in Sidebar Selection: Find the “Waiting For” and “Agendas” Contexts you created earlier in the OmniFocus main window’s sidebar and select both of them (hold ⌘ while clicking them) and then click “Add Current Sidebar Selection” in the Perspective window to have them listed in the below box.

Now that we have the Perspective created we can take it to the practical application.

Using the “People” Perspective

When you sit down with someone of your team, have a telephone conversation with your manager, attend the weekly project status update conference call or chair your sports club board meeting: Open your “People” Perspective and see how it all comes together. Since you have used people’s name or the meeting title when capturing “Waiting Fors” and agenda items, all you need to now do is to go to the OmniFocus search field in the toolbar — best to use and remember the corresponding ⌘⌥F keyboard shortcut — and type (parts of) the person’s name or meeting title.

Now, at one glance, you find what you wanted to discuss and which delegated actions are outstanding. There is no better way to impress in a meeting than by being on top of all the items which need addressing.

Up Next

The OmniFocus Perspective Redux series has now covered the basic set of Perspectives which you’ll be just fine with plus the ones that OmniFocus 2 already ships with. In the last post of the series I’ll be introducing a few special Perspectives which might be extremely inspiring for some and entirely useless for others.

Find all of my OmniFocus posts in my ‘Essentials’ collection. If you like to master OmniFocus, I really recommend the excellent ‘Learn OmniFocus’ learning platform as well as the pragmatic ‘Working with OmniFocus’ video tutorials.