Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac
- Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac
- Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac Download

Custom perspectives is one of the main features that OmniFocus 3 offers that allows you to create a pre-saved view of your projects and tasks for quick referral. I have always longed for a way to create perspective groups because I have a long list of perspectives. Disclaimer: The screenshots shown in this post reflect a beta test product. Features and appearances may change in the final version 3.0. Problem: Too many perspectives creates a long Perspectives Menu I wanted a way to have distinct groups of perspectives in OmniFocus 3. I demonstrated a perspective grouping in OmniFocus 2 using the top toolbar for my Planning perspectives and the Perspectives sidebar for my Doing perspectives. image I am always interested in doing a to refine my workflows.
When something doesn’t feel quite right, I’d like to get to the root of the problem. I introduced a workflow where I arranged my workflow in OmniFocus into a group of planning perspectives (located at the top toolbar in OmniFocus) and a group of doing perspectives (located at the left sidebar).
You can revisit that workflow here: My personal setup has four distinct perspective groups:. Contexts - This perspective group contains a list and of common GTD contexts that I frequently find myself in. This is a shortened list of some of my frequently used contexts. This is most frequently used as my Doing perspectives.
Physical Location - @House, @Office, @Hardware Store. Tool - @Computer, @Phone, @Online. Situation - @Morning, @Afternoon, @Evening. End-Of-Day Review - At the end of the day, I run through a series of perspectives to follow up on today’s activities and prepare for the next day. This is my daily review.
Planning - I use this perspective group when I need to go into Planning mode. Perspectives include: Projects, Tags, Completed, Changed, and Review. Checklists - This perspectives group contains all of my checklists. This is a convenient way to access any lists that I refer to throughout the day. Grouping my perspectives using fake custom perspectives An effective way to group my perspectives is to create a custom perspective with the Pro edition of OmniFocus 3.
Use the Perspective Editor ( Perspectives Show Perspectives) to add a title header. Here is a sample of my perspectives groups on my iPad.
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OmniFocus 3 for Mac has eliminated the ability to put custom perspectives in the top toolbar. I was able to overcome this by using Keyboard Maestro. It’s an invaluable app that just sneaks up on you. You don’t realize how much you can do with KM until you find use case scenarios for it. Grouping my perspectives using Keyboard Maestro Keyboard Maestro is a MacOS X automation app that expands the capabilities of your Mac. You can find KM here: I created different palettes that hold a group of related perspectives. Watch the video of my Perspective Groups.
Creating my OmniFocus 3 Perspectives Group I start up Keyboard Maestro and choose Launch Keyboard Maestro Editor Select File New Macro Group. You’ll be creating a macro group which will contain the different tiles that will invoke the perspective chosen. Change the macro group settings to show:. Available in these applications: OmniFocus. Available in all windows.
Show a palette until: the hot key is pressed If you want this palette to be visible in any app then choose Available in all applications. Change your hotkey to a keyboard combination of your choice. You can also customize the icon by dragging an imagine to the top left to the KM Macro Editor. Click on Palette style to see an example of your KM Macro Group. KM Macro groups will default to show the Macro Group as a standard palette window: If you turn on Shrink, your palette will shrink into an icon. Hover the cursor over the icon to expand the icon into a full palette.
Shrinking the palette is helpful for Macs with smaller screens. Creating the the Perspectives inside the Macro Group Select File New Macro to create the first macro for this group. Add an icon if you desire. Set the Menu Title to Perspectives. Next, set the Menu Item to the Perspective’s name. This KM macro simulates going up to the Perspectives menu and selecting the perspective. KM has a habit of sorting the title alphabetically.
I added a number before the perspective name to enforce my personal sort preferences. Download the KM Macro Group file linked below and change the perspective names to fit your OmniFocus setup. You can duplicate this macro group to have multiple perspective palettes.
As an added bonus, I was able to initiate the iOS Homescreen which features two columns. Change the palette style and enter ‘2’ into the Columns field. This will simulate the home screen that you get when using OmniFocus 3 for iOS.
Keyboard Maestro is a popular app that can add palettes to any app that you may have. Personally, I’m terrible at remembering hot key combinations. Sometimes I like having palettes on screen to remind me of a workflow that I should be performing. I also like having palettes to choose some of my most common actions in an app. I hope you enjoyed this little demonstration. I’m just getting back into Keyboard Maestro myself.
Thanks to and for giving me the idea to use KM to create customized palettes for OmniFocus 3 for Mac. Resources Keyboard Maestro - Download the OmniFocus 3 palette zip file. Shared with Dropbox. I’ve found that creating routines simplifies life. I can create a routine and go through the motions. I have found that I may skip a step or two which can lead to disastrous results. I make assumptions and things fall out of the radar.
My End-Of-The-Day review does this for me. I go through each of the different perspectives that I need to check up to prepare for the next day. I’m already thinking of another palette for my Weekly Review and Monthly Review. I’m not sure where that fits in yet. I wanted to get the Daily Review workflow out of the way first before I start working on the Weekly Review.
Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac
I think I got the idea of the checklist after listening to one of ’s podcasts Mike loves his coffee and he’s trying to drag Joe along. But that still doesn’t stop them from talking checklists and the power they hold.
Ruby Coffee Roasters Bitsbox – Super Powers Kit The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande BrainChains. I hadn’t ever thought about having these palettes triggered via mouseover like this. That’s an interesting approach. A “related” trick with KM palettes that I really enjoy is when you assign multiple items to the same key trigger. Right now you have a palette set to show when using a single keyboard shortcut and then auto-expand with your mouseover.
However if you change it to: “Always activated”. Then assign the same keyboard shortcut to each item, the palette will show and you can use your keyboard to pick the item and the palette will auto-hide afterward. Example Video: What I’m doing in the video:.
Pressing 'CMD+OPT+ALT+SHIFT (HYPER) + A. This activates my top applications palette. Then I can press the first letter of the item to select it from the palette.
I have set them all to be specific single letters to differentiate similar items. After initiating the palette, I press the “S” key to switch to Sublime. I can then initiate the palette again, press “S” to hide Sublime. So if you assigned all of your initial perspectives to “CTRL+OPT+G”, then you could press that key combo, and immediately hit “2” to jump to your Projects. As always thanks for the detailed write-up of your workflows.
Always a beneficial read. I hadn’t thought of this previously but as you know, Wilson, I have a complicated relationship with the sidebar in OmniFocus 3. I think I’m going to use the palette idea to keep the sidebar hidden most of the time.
I may get a little adventurous and switch it on and off automatically as I enter and leave Projects or Tags. For the benefit of others, note that you can put a numerical marker on macros to affect the sorting in a palette. The format is a two-digit number followed by a ) so you could sort the perspectives in the example macro group like this: which produces: Excellent work,! It’s bound to be quite valuable for all the perspective power users out there. Wilsonng: Thanks.
Creating Projects And Groups With Omnifocus 2 For Mac Download
I’ve found that creating routines simplifies life. I can create a routine and go through the motions.
I have found that I may skip a step or two which can lead to disastrous results. I make assumptions and things fall out of the radar. My End-Of-The-Day review does this for me. I go through each of the different perspectives that I need to check up to prepare for the next day. I agree regarding routines and checklists.
Currently as I’m away from home I’m realizing some of my routines/checklists might be a bit too excessive and put too much pressure on me to get all of them done. Maybe I might have a simplified checklist for when I’m busy and a more complicated one when not. Also debating printing out reoccurring checklists to then laminate and check off with a dry erase marker.
Ideas and decisions.