It Rains In Triplicate

So I’ve uploaded my scripts that I use to manipulate and manage OmniFocus at this link. The files in the zip are:

• OFLib.scpt – a library of various OF getters, filters, and modifiers
• Daily Analytics.scptd – a script bundle that generates my end of day analytics (which get posted to my twitter page, which is here)
• Promote.scptd – my script to promote items to the next highest priority
• Demote.scptd – my script to demote items to the next lowest priority
• Clear.scptd – my script to clear the status (priority and flag state) of an item
• copy-lib.sh – a simple script to put the OFLib updates into the right location in a script bundle

To use any of these scripts, put them in your scripts directory for OmniFocus (~/Library/Scripts/Applications/OmniFocus/) and call them from the script menu or customize your toolbar to include them.

More updates, etc as I get to them. Comments, of course, welcome.

Two more pieces …

I’ve been doing the review of my task items on a monthly basis. As a result, the process has been about rejiggering due dates, not cutting irrelevant items and working priorities. So, I’m moving to a monthly review.

Second, an issue. Previously, I could recognize my progress (or lack thereof) by whether or not I finished everything on my daily list, and, more importantly, how many things I had to defer.

So, while in this iteration, I, hopefully, won’t have anything artificially due, so, hopefully, less deferring, but also a limited ability to track progress. I wonder if it is worth throwing together an applescript to post how many tasks I finish in a given day or week.

So I am more seriously working on a GTD process with OmniFocus, abandoning my tried and true, yet broken and distracting strictly date ordered ToDo lists for a proper GTD, next action-based practice.

Since there are new, interesting, and messy drains on my time, yet I’m only working a half time schedule for the next month or so, now is a good time to rework my organization syste ..

So, I’m trying to document it here, if only so I can go back and laugh at myself if it fails terribly and I go back to my daily TODO list.

The goal is to be able to work more fluidly, not to have to schedule all items I need to accomplish during the day, but, instead, all me to juggle priorities in real time. There are some items that are date driven, but my entire day should no longer be date driven.

So, three parts to discuss, tags / context structure, project structure, and workflow (and lists)

CONTEXTS

Ideally, contexts are used to determine what action I will accomplish, based on my location, environment, etc.

In terms of contexts, I used to have a few basic ones. Office, Lab, Home, Anywhere. There was a 5:1 split between anywhere items and everything else. The goal is to have a reasonable split and some better granularity within the categories.

The new split has five top level categories / folders: Anywhere, Home, Store, Work, and Waiting For.

Anywhere is now split between Email, Computer, Reading, Thinking, and Calls.

Store is split between various categories of stores, i.e., Market, Baby Store, Electronics Store, Pharmacy

Work is split between work locations

Waiting For is inspired directly by GTD, which are those actions that are “sitting around” actions, where I am waiting for input from someone before I can continue on with a project.

PROJECTS

My project structure was pretty broad and flat, which made a next-action structure meaningless. I had a few top level areas of responsibility, such as Work Stuff, Projects, Personal, and Writing. Under each of these AORs, I would have a bunch of individual projects, with lots of different tasks. The tasks would be further organized into folders within projects, but the dependencies between the tasks was unclear.

So, I have a two tier AOR system. The first is the general category, right now Personal, Projects, Work, House, Writing.

Within each category are projects or further AOR categories. For example, my major work project <PR> has a bunch of folders for each major product line I’m working. Within those folders are actually projects and tasks. The idea is that a project should be a sequential set of steps, not just an unordered bag of tasks. Projects and their contents should be fluid and short lived, not immutable and long lived.

I also have incubating projects collected, but mark as “on hold” so they don’t clutter my workflow.

For those ideas that are really just incubating (i.e., a couple of sentences that I want to go after someday), are collected into another “on hold” project for each major category above.

WORKFLOW

So, where does the rubber meet the road?

There are two major types of tasks I want to accomplish, those that are due today (time critical) and those that progress my goals / projects to completion. Further, I need to capture, categorize, and promptly forget about any pending tasks that are not the next thing I need to do on a goal / project or due today.

So, workflow …

First, the INBOX. Anything new ends up being immediately captured and categorized, or ends up in an inbox. I have three inboxes:

1. if I’m in my car or away from a computer, I use my JOTT account to capture a voice note, which is emailed to an account that deposits the note into the OmniFocus INBOX
2. if I’m in a place where I can grab my phone, I’ll use OmniFocus for iPhone to write a quick note into my OmniFocus INBOX
3. If I am in a meeting, I’ll mark potential TODO items in my notebook and copy them into OmniFocus at the end of the day

Second, I have a bunch of perspectives that I use.

For day-to-day work, I have three, besides the INBOX:

1. Due Today, which is a list of everything that is flagged or marked as due today. I have daily / weekly / monthly / yearly repeating actions and actions that have a real due date. I can use flags as a short cut for things that I nominate for getting done today, without having to put in artificial due dates
2. Next Action, which is the next action for all projects, regardless of AOR, that are marked as active (i.e., not completed, on hold, or dropped).
3. Waiting For, which are those items that are pending someone else’s input

Finally, I have a Review list for the weekly review and the raw Projects and Contexts list, which show everything, either from a project or context perspective.

So, on a daily basis, I’ll start with my Due Today items. Once I finish those, I’ll go on to my next actions. Interrupt driven taskers will come and go dealt with or recorded.

Issues

So, the only issue I see is that my daily items sometimes have more context than just the day they are due. i.e., one of my daily tasks is to enter my hours for the day. That isn’t relevant until the evening. One solution is to divide up my Due Today list into Daily Checkin / Checkout lists.

The New Doctor Who

Regardless of who the doctor is, I’ll watch the show, but they could have taken a chance, and put someone really different in the role, meaning someone who isn’t a white male british stage actor.

Oh well.

Naming a colony “roanoke” is like naming a ship “titanic” or “hindenburg”. It isn’t that the name has any meaning, but it is just bad luck and asking for trouble …

ipod + 30 minute drive each way to work + audible.com = a lot more reading than I’d normally get done. Canceled my XM radio since I don’t listen to it any more.

Finished off Ghost Brigades. Entertaining and good. Loaded The Last Colony on my ipod to start tomorrow.

My next car will have an AUX in port, I hate FM transmitters.

Finished off The Android’s Dream by Scalzi last night. Good book, very fast read. Started reading it while waiting around O’Hare last week after finishing off last month’s Analog, so probably eight hours of reading all told.

I’m slowly making my way through Scalzi’s books. I got Old Man’s War when Tor was offering it for free. Since then, I’ve grabbed at least three more by him for my Kindle. Hey, what do you know, Tor’s ebook play worked.

The big reveal was a little telegraphed, it seemed somewhat clear when the character was introduced, but the journey to get there was worth it.

My next two or three books will be work related (next on the queue is Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun, a book about project management), but Ghost Brigades is in there soon after.

You knew it was going to be bad, but nothing quite prepares you for just how bad it could be. There is a point about 3/4 through the movie where the director Got Religion, and has to let you know all about it. It would have been just ordinarily bad without that piece.

There is something vaguely amusing about starting a new book on the kindle and have the front matter page come up which says

This book is printed on acid-free paper

So I need to find a good reference manager, that is, something to keep track of the dozen or so academic papers I read in the course of a week, allow me to take notes, and allow me to insert selected references into whatever paper I’m working on.

Back in grad school, I lived in bibdesk, which handled bibtex reference management wonderfully. I had a large SVN repository of PDF files, which had the bibtex file checked in at the root level, and everything worked. I could use it on every machine, since it was a simple flat file and directory structure.

So I now need to do all my writing in Word, complete with its horrible, horrible equation support. So I go searching for a new reference manager.

I’m evaluating papers, sente, bookends, and endnote.

Papers, which I really want to like is BROKEN. Let’s count the ways:

• It is a mechanism for reading academic papers, like iTunes. Great idea, but managing is more useful than reading. That’s fine.
• It provides no synchronization mechanism, because everyone has a single computer that they do all their work on. Bleh.
• It provides no mechanism for actually doing bibliographies or interfacing with word or other editors. So I use it to read my papers, maybe take notes, and then the interesting papers, I’ll copy into word or endnote by hand?

Let’s talk about what a good paper workflow looks like:

1. Constantly collect, index, and annotate research papers
2. Write your own material
3. Create bibliographies and insert references into your work as you write it
4. Goto 1
5. Complete the paper and send it out

Papers could be great, but it has no value in a real paper workflow.

EndNote looks like a beast, and I didn’t particularly like v8. Sente is a good option, but bookends does synchronization, so it is the winning contender at the moment.