My regular readers will know that OmniFocus is my current GTD system of choice. I am busy as hell at the moment and this is pushing my GTD and organizational skills to the limit!

One thing I love about OmniFocus is the size of it. I am always finding cool new ways to use it. Anyway, the OmniGroup have just released a new video on OmniFocus, that covers the use of Perspectives.

The video is not yet on YouTube, and only on the OmniGroup site as a Quicktime .MOV file.

The direct link to the movie is here, check it out and feel free to comment…

Well, I just returned from Affiliate Summit West ‘08 in Las Vegas. Vegas is a 10 hour flight from the UK and we had a 5 hour drive to the airport so you could say that it was a long trip so my expectations were high, but is is Vegas after all.

Anyway, had a great time at the conference. Was a pleasure to meet people such as John Chow, Zac Johnson, and Justine Ezarik. I was gone from home for 5 nights and even though I was away, my tasks and work were not.

My current GTD system of choice is centered around OmniFocus from OmniGroup. I use Moleskine’s as my task capture device, and wherever you find me, the Moleskine is not far behind. This works for me as I can collect and hold numerous tasks on my Moleskine, and then enter them into my OmniFocus application when processing, and time permits.

I own a 17″ MacBook pro, and even though I love it. I really wanted something more portable to take to Vegas with me and the Asus EeePC had really taken my eye. All I need is web, email, and Skype to call back home at 1p a minute rather than the exorbitant rate of 55p per minute with my cell phone. The EeePC ticked all the right boxes so I bought one a couple of weeks ago and it is a fantastic little computer. It isn’t a Mac, so cannot run OmniFocus and I did not want to start looking at Linux based GTD apps, if there are any!

My mobile phone of choice is the Apple iPhone, and as the SDK for the iPhone apps is not yet out, I needed a way to leave my current system at home and still be able to record my tasks.

Sure, I could collect everything into my Moleskine’s but I do like to feel more organised than that and I was looking for some way to integrate with my OmniFocus whilst away.

I had seen an option in the OmniFocus Preferences about emailing actions to OmniFocus so I thought I would read up on the feature and how it can be used.

This is implemented as a Mailbox Rule within Mail.app on the Mac as you can see from looking at the rule below.

I set the OmniFocus application to Create the Mail Rule, archive processed messages and also to process messages where the subject line starts with “–”. Cool, now let’s see a real world example of how I use this every day in my GTD system.

I configured and tested this before I set off to Vegas on my trip. So, from my iPhone I can now email myself, on one of the registered email addresses and all I have to do is start the subject line with “–”, which is something I never see at the start of a subject line and therefore unique. Now, I always carry my Moleskine, but when sat in a conference, or anywhere else where you have WiFi or EDGE connectivity I can quickly send myself this email and it adds it straight to my inbox on OmniFocus as soon as I get back to the UK and power on my Mac.

In the week I was in Vegas I sent myself around 100 tasks. I find this method a great way as I did not have to update OmniFocus with my notes from my Moleskine like I normally do. They were copied directly into the inbox waiting to be processed into the correct context and have dates assigned to them.

Now, I just use this system in its simplest form in that I just get the task added to OmniFocus. As well as this, you have the ability to add various tags to the email to automatically move it to the correct context and set various other items such as the due date etc..

These are as follows:

The first line, and any other lines starting with — (double-hyphens), become new actions. Other lines become notes for the preceding action.

To specify a project, use > (greater-than sign) or :: (double-colons), followed by a project name or abbreviation.

To specify a context, use @ (at sign), followed by a context name or abbreviation.

To enter start or due dates, use # (number sign), followed by some date expression.

To enter a time estimate, use $ (dollar sign—time is money) followed by some duration expression (like 5m, 1h, and so on);

You can also add a note on the same line as an action title by separating them with // (double-slashes). Anything after the double-slashes becomes a note, but double-slashes in a URL like http://omnigroup.com don’t count.

Some examples are as follows:

– Call My Boss

– Paint the Garage Door > Household @ DIY

– Action 3 > Project 1 @ Context 1 // These are notes

– Action 4 #friday // Due Friday, because I only entered one date

– Action 5 #monday #friday // Starts Monday; due Friday.

– Action 6 #monday # // Starts Monday; no due date.

– Action 7 :: Project 3 // Written on my iPhone; colons work in place of greater-than sign.

–Action8>p2@c2#2d$5m//no spaces needed, nor full names

Myself, I would rather just get the task collected and process it later on my Mac using OmniFocus and my full size keyboard.

This is a great way to use the iPhone as part of your GTD solution. That is until OmniGroup release a native iPhone version of OmniFocus after the Apple iPhone SDK release.

Hope you have enjoyed this post and as always, I would love to hear your comments.

Well, after last weeks announcement from Apple about the release of the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) I was eager to see which people announced development of Getting Things Done apps for the iPhone.

I have had an iPhone since they came out in the US as I bought one and hacked it to work in the UK. Being a jail-broke phone, I would have loved some way to sync my tasks to the phone but there have to date been no workable solution. So the announcement of the SDK was met with glee.

Well, the OmniGroup, makers of OmniFocus have announced on their blog, and via there forums that they are already working on a iPhone and iPod touch native version of OmniFocus.

Further to the blog post, there was an interesting comment from Ken Case at OmniGroup about the sync functionality of the application.

The Mac and iPhone applications will be able to synchronize changes with each other through any WebDAV server (including Apple’s .Mac), so you won’t have to worry about plugging your iPhone into your Mac to synchronize your latest edits back and forth.

(Multiple Macs will also be able to synchronize with each other through the same WebDAV server, for those of you who might be wondering about that.)

Well, this news is great. I currently love my iPhone and OmniFocus set up but I rely upon the ability to send email from my iPhone to OmniFocus as a task (More coming in the next post about this). The ability to have working copies of my GTD system both on my MacBook Pro as well as my iPhone is fantastic. I can walk around with my entire GTD system in my Pocket and the ability to update this on the fly from anywhere in the world. Could this be the ultimate ubiquitous capture device?

Anyway, you can be sure I will be keeping abreast of further developments and I will also scour for other GTD apps planned for the iPhone.

Have a great day!

Just got back from a nice weekend away with the family, turned my laptop on and OmniFocus 1.0.1 has been released.

Here is the list of updates in 1.0.1

Stability

Updated our error handling support to catch more cases where there is a possible problem and promote it to a crash, so that we can then fix it. Since OmniFocus always keeps its data in a saved state, the net effect of this is that any such exception won’t be able to cause data corruption.

Copy a workaround for a bug in Mac OS X 10.5 that can cause a crash when using the keyboard to navigate between cells in the outline.

Fixed exception where committing editing on a row caused that row to be collated into a different group.

Fixed a few glitches in the AppleScript suite that could cause scripting errors.

Fixed exceptions when parsing some European date formats. Updated the date parsing to log details about the date format if there is a problem parsing a date, allowing the user to more easily gather the relevant information in the future.

Fixed an occasional hang when performing a manual check for updates when no updates are available.

Clicking on a link to a recently deleted task will no longer cause an error.

We now ignore and log exceptions raised from Growl.

Fixed bug causing the available/due soon/overdue timer to fire too often in some cases.

iCal syncing will now deal with unnamed calendars.

Interface

The Perspectives menu now always has options to make a new perspective or save a snapshot of the current view settings into the current perspective.

The Clear Perspective command has been folded into the Revert to Default View command, so you don’t have to take two steps to get back to normal.

Actions created in context mode should no longer appear to be missing their project, once it is assigned.

Updated usage of shadows in the interface to match changes made in Mac OS X 10.5.

Empty projects with a start date will now get the normal project icon once its start date passes instead of getting stuck with the ‘pending’ badge.

The flag icon should now show up appropriately in HTML exports.

Miscellaneous

Various small updates to the online help.

Turned off some debug logging in the Clip-o-Tron 3000.

Software Update will now only show you builds on the same track that you are running. So, if you want to see sneakypeek builds, you’ll need to manually download one sneakypeek build main OmniFocus site.

Internationalization

Fixed several issues that would prevent internationalization. No localizations are in place, but those are in progress for a future release.

Already installed it and I am eager to try out some of the new functionality!

As many of you will know, I have been following and also been a part of the beta testing for OmniFocus. Well, I am glad to announce, if you do not already know that OmniFocus is now at version 1.0, released and available to purchase from The OmniFocus Store.

Here is a snippet about OmniFocus..

Task management shouldn’t be your full time job. We’ve built OmniFocus to take a load off your mind by managing your tasks the way that you want, freeing you to focus your attention on the things that matter to you most. Finish that novel. Spend more time with your friends and family. Grow your business. Let us worry about keeping your goals and tasks, both personal and professional, in one ordered, easy to access system that you can depend on.

When time permits, I will be reviewing OmniFocus here on this Blog, but until then, try it out and Download the Demo, if of course, you use a Mac!

I mentioned Things, the new Mac GTD application in a previous post.

I have just read a pretty good review of the Alpha release of Things over at LifeHacker.com

I have briefly toyed with Things, but I am spending a lot of my GTD research time right now still with OmniFocus, which I must admit I am loving and the daily updates are bringing new features to the party all the time.

It is a fantastic time to be a Mac owner, and into Getting Things Done. I cannot wait to fully review all these new GTD applications.

Time for a bit of reader participation.

I have nearly 800 subscribed readers to this blog so I know you are out there!I am interested in hearing from you all what system you use to implement GTD?

How many of you use apps like Nozbe, iGTD, NextAction, and OmniFocus? How many of you own and use a Moleskine?

Comment on this post and let me know you are there!Thanks, in anticipation of course.. 

Hey, I’m back, hope you missed me!

Had a break from blogging, but not from Getting Things Done and now it is time to get back to the action. Just upgraded this site to the shiny new Wordpress 2.3.1, broke a few things, tested my PHP knowledge but the site is up and running again. Been away from blogging for a few months and now there are tons more cool SEO and other Wordpress plugins. The upgrade to 2.3.1 also sees the introduction of Widgets, rather than my old K2 sidebar modules.I am also using K2 v 0.9.1 as the theme for this site, but I now see that 0.9.6 is out, so I feel a change is due. Mind you, I feel like getting a shiny new look and feel for this site and going for it! Probably go to 0.9.6 by the time you read this post.

So, what has been going on in the world of Andrew Mason. Well, as I blogged about a while back, I left a company which I founded in 2001 back in Jan of 07. I then set up a company called RandomStorm. RandomStorm is a vulnerability management company, in brief, we check your external and internal networks for any known security and configuration vulnerabilities. Been busy building this up over the past few months, really having to put my GTD skills to the test, but I am glad to say that it is now going really well and the future for RandomStorm is looking very good. I got a few good ideas for some new posts, and I even fancy creating Mind Maps for the whole of the Getting Things Done book. I don’t think anybody else has done this so may be a pretty cool thing to do.

Well, back to the title of this post, which is about the fact that I have just pre-registered for OmniFocus, from the OmniGroup. Those of you who have followed this blog will already know that I am an avid user of Mac OSX, and would not Get Things Done on any other OS. I am going to write more about my first twelve months with GTD in another post so I will keep this quite brief but I have been using a trust pen, moleskine, and iGTD as my GTD system of choice for the past six months, with great success. I have found quite a few limitations with iGTD and the fact that they seem to have stopped in it’s development spurned me into looking at OmniFocus. iGTD used to be updated like all the time, and there have been no updates at all over the past few months. This may be because work is underway with iGTD2. Now, I have always been a huge believer in the fact that it is the system that works for you, and not the software application. A trusty pen and paper used well, is better than the most advanced techno PDA or smartphone with the latest GTP application on it, if it is not used correctly. OmniFocus has been very well supported in the GTD community and Merlin Mann of 43Folders.com has been one of the OmniFocus team for quite a while, adding his own little slant on how it should work. All in all, should make for a cool app.

So, I am busy this week transferring my next actions, projects, and contexts from iGTD to OmniFocus. I will give it a go and see how I get on with it, and obviously, report all findings here on my blog.