A Good Brain Dump ⇾
Ben Brooks shares another tip on how he uses OmniFocus, this time for brain dumps. I like the concept — he goes through his contexts and quickly dumps in any tasks/errands that come to his mind. Very handy.
He doesn’t call this a review, but in essence it’s a part of GTDs weekly review concept. That’s the beauty of productivity though — you don’t have to follow a manual. Just be self aware and find what works for you.
Then stick with it.
C.J. Chivers recently wrote about ditching all digital task management tools for paper. This type of insight in another person’s process always interests me — I often feel the pull to go completely to paper.
I mean, that’s obvious, right?
But every time I’ve tried using only paper to track the important bits and ideas in my life, I’ve always found the concerns too overwhelming. C.J. touches on backups in his post. I’d add to that last syncing and search-ability. Those advantages our digital tools offer us are not taken lightly by this writer.
Over time, I’ve learned to use a happy combination of paper and digital tool (OmniFocus in my case). My setup would be more inline with Aaron Mahnke’s, which he summarized in a response to C.J’s post last week. Aaron gives a summary of how paper is where he works in the trenches, while OmniFocus is where he shoots back up to 30,000 feet and gets the big picture in working order.
My process is similar. I absolutely need paper, but more for certain aspects of my day, rather than my entire system. OmniFocus is my Inbox, where various links and URLs are dumped, to be processed later. It’s also where I document all my big projects, each with it’s specific action items or Someday ideas.
But paper is where I work things out. It’s where I first mockup a design, brainstorm an idea, or create lists for a particular piece of work. It’s also my scratchpad throughout the day. There is simply something special that occurs when you put pencil or pen to paper — I’ll leave it to others to name this something special. I’ll just give credence to its existence.
Those first two use cases are obvious — many folks who use digital tools do the same. But some may wonder about the third. Creating lists of items for a particular piece of work sounds like a series of actions for a project, does it not? It does. But sometimes it’s plain faster to jot the list down and paper and keep cranking away on the project.
Opening OmniFocus represents several opportunities: you can transition from doing to planning without realizing it. It also distracts from the task at hand and reminds you of the other projects requiring your attention. When I’m working away on a project and this list comes to mind, sometimes writing it down on paper is the right thing to do.
An example may help. If I’m working on a design for a site, and I’m writing the copy for a page, I may get some inspiration as to what to write for the footer. Or the potential pages to include in the sitemap. Jotting those thoughts on paper gets them out of my head and helps me to continue on with the original task. When completed, maybe I move on to these new ideas. Maybe they stay on the paper. No problem if that happens, I can process the notes later and add them to my digital system.
I could add them to the system immediately, but the cost is too high in the moment. And so I use a hybrid system. It’s flexible and suited to the moment, which is what any ‘system’ should be.
Since I already own versions of OmniFocus for the iPhone and desktop, this looks like an easy sell for me. I love Things as well, but the lack of a OTA sync has been extremely frustrating with three clients. So much so that I’ve basically stopped using it.
So I found it interesting that the page for OmniFocus for the iPad states:
It’s simple to maintain one task management database across several devices with any of our several options for syncing wirelessly.
That is an interesting opening statement. Not sure I need to spend another $40 on a task management app though …
