The context view is brilliant for dealing with email. I can keep track of what everyone is doing for this paper and where they should be up to by clicking on the context ‘digital kitchen team’:
Omnifocus context vs project how to#
I’m writing a chapter in this book called “The Digital Kitchen” with the super awesome moderation team from the ‘ How to Survive your PhD’ MOOC. For example, I’m editing a book with Deborah Lupton and Pat Thomson called ‘Digital Academics’ for Routledge. This context view also helps me co-ordinate my work with other people. When I click on the context ‘Reading’ I see every action tagged with that context – this automagically generates a reading list aligned with my current projects: A context can be anything – a person, a place, or even a mood. My context list contains ‘modes’ of academic work – writing, reading, teaching – as well as people that I work with. This is useful for complex knowledge work. Contexts are just another way of viewing actions. You’ll notice the action “Read Lives is Ruins” is attached to a project and a context. I used the photo to locate a URL to buy the book on Kindle and started reading it. This is how the action appeared on my computer later: I took a photo of the cover and attached it to the action and synched to the Omnifocus cloud. I pulled out my phone and added a new action to my How to be an academic list about reading the book. It was funny and interesting – exactly what I am aiming for, but I don’t like reading paper books anymore. I saw a book in a bookstore called “Lives in Ruins” about the working lives of archeologists. I’ve been looking for chatty, fun, non fiction books because that’s the tone I imagine for How to be an academic. I’m very aware that what you read influences your writing. The light grey column on the far right is context specific, it shows the meta data and files attached to the selected action. Actions close to the due date are yellow they turn red when they are due. When an action is complete you click in the circle next to it and a big, fat, satisfying tick appears.
Omnifocus context vs project series#
In the middle you see a series of actions related to my various writing projects and their due dates. In this screen shot you can see this book in my writing project list on the left (grey) column. The book will be called How to be an academic. This is like chopping up all the vegetables before you start doing a stir-fry: all the ‘digital stuff’ you need to do that action are in one place.įor example, I’m writing a book based on the blog for University of New South Wales Press (yay!). In Omnifocus2, each project action can be entered and saved, with metadata and/or further information attached to it: word files, PDFs, photos, audio files and so on.
The Getting Things Done system conceptulises your work as having actions directed at goals, which, Allen points out, can be understood as different projects. Omnifocus2 changed all that by helping me implement the Getting Things Done system with minimal changes to my existing workflow. To be honest with you, I knew that further implementation of the Getting Things Done principles was a good idea, but it seemed too hard. If I need to find an email from a person, I just use the search function. While I have folders for automated feeds, the vast majority of emails end up in one folder called “archive”. My email has a similarly lean file structure, as you can see in the image below. For example, the folders on my hard drive relate to what I do: administration, writing, researching, teaching, supervising, blogging. I read Getting Things Done years ago and implemented a few of the suggestions to great effect. Jason told me Omnifocus2 was different because it is built around the famous ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) by David Allen. Like being on a strict diet, complying with the digital tool made me feel … constricted. I’ve tried many project management tools, such as Producteev, Freedcamp and Trello, but, after an initial period of enthusiasm, I abandoned each one. I’ll admit that I was initially skeptical. My friend and extreme productivity guru Dr Jason Downs listened to my whingeing and suggested Omnifocus2. Two valued staff members left within a couple of months and I temporarily added their work to my already over burdened to-do list. I’ve been coping using this simple pen and paper method (just), but in January I hit crisis point. I think I’m pretty good at working multiple projects with complex dependencies, but moving into a management role at ANU has pushed me to my limit.įor years I’ve been using a simple to-do list system based on Cal Newport’s “How to be a straight A student”.
My background in architecture offices has given me a range of time and project management skills that are helpful in my second career as an academic.
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