By popular request, here is a guide to some of the more advanced ways that OmniFocus can be used. This is less of a “this is my OmniFocus philosophy and system” article and more of a “here are some cool ways to use the application that you may not have been aware of” piece.
If you don’t know what OmniFocus is, it is a powerful database-driven task management application for the Mac. We have an in-depth series on how to get things started with OmniFocus coming out in a few weeks – this article assumes that you already use the program and are pretty familiar with the basics of task management.
If you are looking for a shortcut to use OmniFocus the right and effective way, check out OmniFocus Premium Posts. It’s our guide that is simple, practical and it has a lot of field-tested workflows and solutions to help you use OmniFocus the right way. Click here for more information.
In part, these short videos were inspired by both Merlin Mann’s talk and David Spark’s talk from MacWorld on how they use OmniFocus.
UPDATE: If you want to see how we use Omnifocus, check out our Omnifocus series.
Preference Options
Right-click and save: Asian Efficiency OmniFocus Style / Theme
Cool Functions You Didn’t Know About
Perspectives
Photo by: Jerry Ferguson
If you liked this post, you may like our OmniFocus Premium Posts – the simple guide to use OmniFocus the right and effective way. Click here for more information.
P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy our Premium Newsletters. It's where we share our cutting-edge productivity secrets. Click here to learn more about them.
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Great article! Learned a lot!
Marloes
Thanks Marloes!
Great post!
Thanks Sean!
Can I ask what the anti-procrastinate icon in yr O.F. toolbar is? and what it does?
Yup. It loads up a list of tasks to do when you’re low energy and want to procrastinate. I go into more detail about it in the next OmniFocus tutorial which is going live in about an hour =)
Yup. It loads up a list of tasks to do when you’re low energy and want to procrastinate. I go into more detail about it in the next OmniFocus tutorial which is going live in about an hour =)
Picked up the theme… Looks great
Some helpful stuff – but you didn’t explain Action Groups that well – your mouse is clicking around to create nested lists, but you don’t show us what you’re doing.
Is it “add child/aunt”?
Also, more detail about how you created your perspectives would also be helpful. The big takeaway here is just “use them” not “here’s how you make them”
Am going through your series of posts, maybe there’s more info there.
Hi Lulamae,
I actually use keyboard shortcuts to do nested lists.
Control + Command + Right moves an item one level in, Control + Command + Left moves an item one level out. Control + Command + Up/Down move the items up and down.
We definitely have more on perspectives in our series of posts – there’s an index of them here: http://www.asianefficiency.com/omnifocus/
- Aaron
hi,
I’m looking for a feature and i seem not to find it anywhere. Is it possible to get the number of the actions in a project?? You can see that on OmniFocus for iPhone, but I don’t find that anywhere on the mac version.
thanks,
victor
Hi Victor you have to install some script on the Mac. You can find a lot of them here:
http://forums.omnigroup.com/forumdisplay.php?f=44
I hope you can find what you’re looking for there!
It is sometimes hard to understand what you are saying. The volume is uneven and I have to increase the volume to the max on macbook.
Hey Gbp, sorry about that – have you tried earphones? I just had another listen through and it seems to be OK for me with 1-2 bars of volume on my Mac.
Might also be a case of accents – I’ll make a note to include transcripts for future videos.
In the end of video “Cool Functions You Didn’t Know About” you are saying that you have to unflag the actions otherwise they still show up in your today list. But why don’t you just put the Availability Filter to “Available” or “Remaining” instead of “Any Status”? This would automatically clear the items from your Today list.
Whats also cool is if you put the Today filter to Available instead of Remaining you can flag your repeating actions (daily, weekly, monthly) and they will automatically show up in your today list once they become available. Then you just mark them as done and once the task is available again it is back in your today list.
Thanks for the posts and videos! I highly appreciate that you used your own working version of OmniFocus in the videos, it gives me a much better visual understanding of what others are doing/using and the ‘real life’ capabilities of the software.
Cheers,
Christopher
Thanks Christopher! Glad you like it. There will be more videos coming out soon.
I like the videos, but what I liked best I can not find. How do you get start and due dates to show?
In OmniFocus:
View > Show View Bar
Also: View > Columns.
We encourage thoughtful and energetic discussions on our posts as long as they adhere to our commenting policy.
Basically, do not spam :-)