OmniFocus Perspectives Redux: Introduction & Planning

It is time to update my old posts on OmniFocus Perspectives since a lot has changed since I originally posted my OmniFocus Perspective Galore series, most notably OmniFocus itself.

OmniFocus 2 comes with more built-in Perspectives which made some of my OmniFocus 1 Perspectives obsolete. The way Perspectives are built has also changed and got significant easier to understand and do.

All very good reasons to start a new mini series on useful Perspectives in OmniFocus 2 on the Mac.

Why Perspectives

Your workflow may just be perfect with what OmniFocus offers out of the box and you do not need any additional, saved views on your tasks and projects which is what Perspectives ultimately are. In addition, with OmniFocus 2, Custom Perspectives are only available as part of the Pro edition.

Perspectives allow you to filter, sort and group your data in different ways, save these views and access them anytime you need via the sidebar, menu or a keyboard shortcut.

You can chose to view only available (those you can action) tasks from a selected set of projects, sorted by due date or flag status. Also viewing tasks grouped by Context sorted by the date they have been created is an option. The possibilities are not unlimited, but extremely rich and with that comes the risk of creating way too many Perspectives resulting in more clutter than value.

Useful Perspectives

As always I recommend to keep it to the minimum possible. Ideally you build your Perspectives around your workflow. Most people will have a similar workflow to the one I have:

• Planning — Deciding what you are going to do today, this week or month
• Doing — This is what it is all about, isn’t it?
• Reviewing — Making sure you are on top of things, all projects and actions are still organised, valid and relevant

The Perspectives I will cover in this series will all fall into one of these three categories. There are many more that could be useful for your individual workflow and you are encourage to get inspired by Perspectives that others are using and have shared like the ones from David Sparks or Brett Kelly.

You will find many creating quite similar Perspectives because they simply make sense. However, there are also some neat ones you may not have thought about yet.

Planning

Each day in the morning and sometimes even the night before I sit down and plan out my day. There are things I need to do and things I want to accomplish and more often than not they are more than I have time for.

So while everyone hopefully knows what they need to do in general, planning your day helps with the details of picking achievable chunks that allow you getting a (little) closer to your goals every day.

The first Perspective I look at when I open OmniFocus is my “Planning” Perspective which I can access through my sidebar — you need to click the little star icon in the Perspective window (⌘^P) next to your Custom Perspective to add it permanently to your sidebar — but mostly invoke through the keyboard shortcut assigned to it (^P in my case).

It is not using the project hierarchy and hence based on Contexts. Contexts are also what is used to group all currently available actions in my “Planning” Perspective. Available means the actions are neither blocked by another action in a sequential project, deferred or in a Context that is “On Hold”. In essence “Planning” shows all actions I could be doing today.

Contexts-based Perspectives also have the additional benefits that they sync to the OmniFocus counterparts on iOS where Project-based Perspective do not sync over (yet).

As I work my way through the list of actions I do a few different things

1. Clean-up my Inbox since I typically never assign a Context to newly captured actions the “Planning” perspective conveniently shows them grouped under “No Context”
2. Identify any actions already completed or no longer relevant as sometimes I forgot to check them off the day before when completing them
3. Flag those actions I want to work on today and because the Perspective sorts by “Flagged” status they will automatically be promoted to the top of the respective Context group

If I have a very specific Context I am working in for the day, say I am at Home or with lots of energy ready to Focus, I can also select that Context in the sidebar and more selectively pick the actions. The sidebar is set to only display “Active Contexts” since the others are simply not relevant for the purpose of the Planning Perspective since they do not contain actionable items. And as Dieter Rams once said: “What has no function should not be there.”

Forecast & Calendar

My next stop is the built-in Forecast Perspective of OmniFocus since it shows a number of tasks which do not appear in the Planning Perspective as they are assigned “On Hold” Contexts, e.g. they are not actionable for me.

These are exclusively from two Contexts I use for “Waiting For” and “Agenda” actions and they always have a due date assigned. “Waiting For” is obvious and the Forecast view reminds me whom I may need to nudge today as they still owe me something. Tasks from the “Agenda” Context relate to meetings that I am scheduled to have that day reminding me on things to discuss.

When I go through the Forecast view I look at three aspects

1. Whom is meant to come back to me today and either needs a reminder or has already returned in which case I can check off the action
2. Which agenda items do I have for today’s meetings and in case the meeting has been rescheduled allows me reassign a new due date; Otherwise it may remind me for some minor preparation I still need to do for the meetings in question
3. Look at the calendar if I can actually fit all the stuff I decided for into the day; Sometimes that means going back to the Planning Perspective and drop a few flags

I normally look at my daily schedule in iCal, but the nice bars in OmniFocus are a nice reminder to make a reasonable judgement on the time available for planned work. In addition it shows me which meetings are still ‘on’ helping with step 2 of above process.

One of the most overlooked features in the Forecast view is the ability to assign new due dates to tasks by dragging and dropping them on a date in the date picker in the left sidebar. You can even use ⌘ or ⇧ to select multiple tasks for dragging and dropping.

What you will notice is that I do not use the option to show deferred tasks with a start date today in the Forecast view (under ‘View > Show View Options’, clicking the ‘Eye of Sauron’ in the toolbar or ⇧⌘V). Deferred tasks will show up in the Planning Perspective when their time has come. If I need to change the deferral date I typically do that during my Weekly Review.

On to Doing

You will find that some OmniFocus users have similar or maybe even identical setups, but others may go different about planning. Generally I am confident that these two Perspectives will be sufficient for most and they should keep your daily planning to 10 minutes or less and get you to ‘Doing’ fast. And ‘Doing’ Perspectives is what we will cover in the next part of this OmniFocus Perspective Redux series.

Perspective Icons: Before I get thousands of emails and comments concerning the icons I use, they are designed by Josh Hughes and available for free on GitHub.

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.