Jotting Things Down in OmniFocus
/I’ve been slowly wading into the OmniFocus pool, having bought the iPhone app a couple weeks ago after finishing David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The learning curve is significant, but reading GTD helps a lot, and I’m slowly starting to assimilate the iPhone app into my workflow.
The power and flexibility of OmniFocus allows me to be as strict or lenient with the official GTD methodology as I want. One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how I like to use the Inbox. OmniFocus is so robust that it initially took me almost a minute to figure out how to properly input an action. I’m getting better, but sometimes I just want to jot something down quickly and process it later. Fortunately, OmniFocus’s Inbox is perfect for that sort of thing.
J. Eddie Smith, IV puts it very nicely:
The OmniFocus inbox just seems like the best “don’t think about where to put it, just get it down” place.
If a non-actionable thought is truly worth saving, you can always move it to a better saving place later. There should be no rules around what you write to your inbox, only rules about what stays in OmniFocus.
His article is full of practical tips for using iOS’s quick entry and Inbox features. I was beginning to uncover a similar strategy myself, but Eddie sheds a whole lot of light on using OmniFocus to capture anything and everything. Love it.