mu omnifocus for mac just stopped working

When you have a recurring pointer to outside storage, you can put things there with a sense of how quickly OmniFocus will remind you to get back to them. The key to using other tools is to plan to do so. Just as your spouse is not the best place to store your project lists, OmniFocus is not the best tool for some categories of planning or storage-but it’s always the best place to keep your “meta-organization:” the pointers you use to keep it all on your radar.

In fact, you should point to anything you use as a store of information, and you certainly have such places: Do you have a table where you put your opened paper mail until you have time to deal with it? Does your spouse remember things for you that you only sporadically write down, or which they don’t always provide to you in a list of perfect bullet points while you enter them into OmniFocus? You need pointers to both places, such as, “Ask Sam during breakfast what I should keep in mind today.” The key thing about pointers and external organization is that you can point to anything. The recurring task to take a photo of my whiteboard for my inbox is my pointer the whiteboard itself is the external store of information that’s not in OmniFocus. In my book Take Control of Your Productivity, I call these “pointers,” because they point you outside of OmniFocus to somewhere else you’ve stored information or project organization. These integrations take place using a particular subset of your tasks. If not, document what’s substandard about it and use that information to try again. If the tool and the integration work, keep it.Integrate these into your OmniFocus workflow, and stop trying to shoehorn that task into OmniFocus.(You can use a frustrating moment in OmniFocus as a cue to consider this.) Select a potentially better organizational tool or method for specific tasks, suited for your needs.Your mileage may vary, perhaps if you share your shower with offspring who would take a marker as an invitation to use the entire wall as a sketchpad. But it’s not the best place to store ideas I have in the shower.Ī whiteboard is simply better than OmniFocus for that one particular case, and specifically the best tool for me. It’s the first place I look in the morning and the last place I look when wrapping up my day. The better approach is use OmniFocus for what it’s best at doing, and give yourself the necessary freedom to step outside when other tools are better for specific tasks.įor example, OmniFocus is the best tool I’ve ever found for coming up with a grand scheme that will take a decade to complete, and have it tell me what to do this Tuesday about it.

That said, there is a fast road to disliking and being discouraged by any tool or app you’re attempting to use, including OmniFocus: using it for things it’s not designed to do. There’s no question that OmniFocus has been best in class since its initial release, and OmniFocus 3 is continuing that trend. I’ve been running my own business (sometimes businesses, plural) since 1993, and in that time I’ve tried nearly every prominent project and task manager that came down the pike.

Mu omnifocus for mac just stopped working