Mortgage loan officer, novelist, and musician, Eric Bowers, joined us from Florida to share his simple, yet highly effective approach to OmniFocus.
- The OmniFocus web add-on subscriptions exist for customers who already own a standalone app, but wish to add web access. The web add-on subscription is only available through the Omni Store. Subscriptions are managed through your Omni account. ⚠️ An existing license for OmniFocus for Mac or iOS is required for the web app to work.
- Pros: OmniFocus is the best and the most powerful GTD software that I have used. Especially in the OmniFocus 3, the tag (replace the context from OF2) and the great iPhone app can help me tag anything, including places and contacts and so on, and keep track with everything.
Eric Bowers is an experienced OmniFocus user who has honed his setup and workflows over the years, with some help from Learn OmniFocus. His productive use of his Apple gear and apps helps him pursue a variety of fun and meaningful pursuits in his life and work.
With the help of Capterra, learn about OmniFocus, its features, pricing information, popular comparisons to other Task Management products and more. Still not sure about OmniFocus? Check out alternatives and read real reviews from real users. Unbiased OmniFocus Review 2020 Task management app for iOS with light and dark modes that can display, or 'focus on', a selected sets of tasks at any given t.
Omnifocus 2020
Session Overview
Eric shared how he’s using OmniFocus in combination with Fantastical and other productivity apps to manage his life and work. Topics covered include:
- Eric’s overarching practice of managing time, not tasks to maintain a system that’s effective and as simple as possible.
- Why he switched from Things to OmniFocus.
- Why and how he uses his calendar app of choice, Fantastical, as his daily driver and where OmniFocus comes into play.
- How he uses emojis to distinguish between tags that represent metadata and those that are being used for traditional GTD contexts.
- His strategy for implementing checklists in OmniFocus.
- The role that other productivity apps, including Ulysses and MindNode, play in his system and why defining these roles is essential.
- How he uses the same conventions in multiple apps to make switching between apps as easy as possible.
- Why he uses a new app from the Iconfactory called Tot to quickly and easily capture things that have his attention.
- How he keeps the number of actions in OmniFocus manageable.
- And more…
About Eric Bowers
Eric Bowers wears many hats. His diverse life and work span many different areas, including:
- Financial Industry — Eric has been working in the financial industry for two decades. He enjoys helping people and uses OmniFocus to help provide outstanding service to his clients while maintaining a healthy balance between work and other areas of life.
- Artistic Pursuits — He’s also a bass player and singer who writes original material, mostly for his own amusement. And he’s halfway to completing a sci-fi/drama novel called “The Mayor of Blackout County”, that’s slated for release in December 2020.
- Podcast and Writing Gigs — Eric was recently a guest on The Omni Show, where he talked about how he uses OmniFocus for everything from pool maintenance to his day job. He also wrote an article for Inside OmniFocus, On Managing Life, and contributed an article entitled How MindNode Propels Eric Forward – Writing a Novel to the MindNode blog.
- Bowers Voice — When not working on his new novel, Eric posts on his personal blog, Bowers Voice. He has a reputation as an Apple nerd amongst his friends and families and, not surprisingly, many of his blog posts centre around Apple technologies and OmniFocus.
- Three Dog Night — Eric lives in Florida with his wife and is a “dog dad” to three little canines. He’s also been known to do impressions, sometimes even professionally.
I want to share my current OmniFocus set up with you for inspiration. After reviewing the official GTD set up guide and watching David Sparks’ course (https://learn.macsparky.com), I customized OmniFocus in a way that works for me, my brain, my daily actions, and workflow. If you’ve been turned off by OmniFocus, this approach may help you see it from a different perspective!
Custom Perspectives
Using the Pro-level subscription, I’ve set up a series of perspectives that work really well for my daily flow. To get them to show up on the sidebar and set up customized icons, click Perspectives from the Menu Bar and click the “star” on the right. You can also rearrange their order here. All perspectives are saved to the cloud and show up on mobile as well.
You can see them on the left side of my screen here:
I need to change the color of that Tickler icon! It looks better in dark mode
The Forecast Perspective is built into OmniFocus and you can learn more about that in the official GTD set up guide. I’m also following a lot of the foundational instructions in that guide like using the “—“ and viewing projects as “Remaining.”
The first custom perspective I have is called “Projects.” This view displays all items with the TAG Projects. I couldn’t come up with a better name. This is the purest form of the Projects term for GTD — the Complete Projects Desired Outcomes List. This is not the default Projects view that is built-in to OmniFocus. I’ll get into that later.
I keep it at the top of my list because I like to work from my Projects list to trigger next actions. I usually start all of my projects with a keyword or acronym. I like to keep a flat list of all things professional and personal that I’m working on at the Level 1 horizon.
Next, I have a perspective called Contexts. When OmniFocus changed their terminology from Contexts to Tags, I was disappointed. I like to think of these areas as my Contexts, not tags! So I created a new perspective that displays all tags . This way, I can see all of these lists at a quick glance. I just like the name Contexts better! I can easily view the original Tags page by clicking Perspectives > Tags (which I need to do sometimes).
Daily Use — I occasionally scan this during the week, but this context is really just a “master view” of all next actions.
Weekly Use — I use this perspective to quickly scan all contexts and review with ease. Makes the Weekly Review really fun.
Agendas, Waiting For, Office, Home, Errants, Someday/Maybe, and Tickler are all flat lists. They just show that context by itself on a simple, clean list. I like them in this order for how my brain works.
The Phone Perspective
I found myself not really using the Anywhere context, so I created this “Phone view” to show me anything I can do at a smart Phone. It is set up to show anything tagged with Calls, Slack, and Texts. In the next photo, you’ll see how this is set up. I have the '— symbol' in each section because I haven’t found a way for the perspective to continue showing the tag when all of its available actions are complete. (For instance, without the —, the calls and texts tags wouldn’t show. I like to see all 3 of them at all times so I can add to them from this perspective and skip the inbox. Yes, you can add this tag directly from the inbox, but often as I process my PHYSICAL inbox, I’ll go right to the action list, so this solves that problem for me.)
In the filter rules for the Phone perspective, here are the settings I created. To add a nested rule, you hold “option” and click the plus button. The master rule should be set to ANY and the sub groups set to a “ALL” for each of the ones below.
Likewise for the Computer perspective, I like to see my computer options in 2 views: Things to do on the computer AND “Surf” which is like a someday/maybe list of things that aren’t as mission critical but I still want to see when I’m at a computer.
The main
Projects Default Perspective is where I keep nested lists and support material I refer to as needed. I also like to use Evernote, Ulysses, MindManager, Dropbox, and other sources — so this isn’t the only place Project Support material is stored. I make a note to myself at the PROJECT level (on the Project list) to view the support material in these folders. I also know to go here during the Weekly Review if I need to review Checklists and other reference items.Coaching questions that have really helped me
- Are these the options I want to see when I do work?
- Do these lists attract or repel me?
- Does this work for me when I do the weekly review?
- I do not use all of the features in OmniFocus and don’t want to
- I do not use OmniFocus for any attachments. I’ll write in the notes field if needed or a short note of where to find it.
- I am not “matchy-matchy” (Thanks Coach Kelly for that)
- I don’t use the “Review” function built into OmniFocus
If this was helpful to you, let me know! I don’t think there’s ANY perfect application out there but I really like how I’ve customized OmniFocus and it makes my processing and defining and DOING time much more fun and engaging.Happy to answer any questions if I can be of help!
Omnifocus 2020 Conference
JM