One way to not neglect these types of “boring” tasks is to schedule time for it. In the morning, I declare a 45 minute to 1 hour time block as a time block for me to get to work on something. I usually hide away in a different part of the office building. I basically turn into a ghost and tell me colleagues that I am busy doing my admin/maintenance work. Don’t bother me unless it is something urgent. Any new messages can be sent to my e-mail and I’ll deal with it after my admin work is done. It’s like going to the gym. “Going to the gym to exercise” is an optional task inside OmniFocus. But if it becomes an appointment on your calendar, it becomes a “must do”. I don’t want to miss my doctor’s appointment for 2 pm this afternoon because I have to pay a $70 missed appointment penalty. Ugh.
I have a four hour work morning (240 minutes). I take 45-60 minutes of my morning to try to power through as many of my maintenance tasks as I can. I take a small break. Then I try to take another 45-60 minutes to make significant progress on one of my Big Rock projects (active projects that are not single action lists). That’s already 90-120 minutes of my 4 hour morning. At 120 minutes, that’s half of my morning. I leave the other 120 minutes as free time to keep working on maintenance tasks or Big Rocks. Or I might just have to deal with the daily interruptions in life.
During these time blocks for the Big Rock or Admin work, everything goes to voice mail or e-mail. The phone is in do-not-disturb mode. I don’t get any of the notifications from my various apps. Limiting interruptions as much as possible. Sometimes s**t happens and I just have to deal with it. But I do try not to miss my Big Rock hour or my Admin work hour.
In the afternoon, I repeat the same process. One 45-60 minute block for admin work and one 45-60 minute block for Big Rock work. Then the rest of the time is unstructured for me to deal with the afternoon crowd.
Leaving tasks in the action list will remind you to do something about an issue but setting aside time to work in that perspective or context will move it closer to completion.
Altogether 90-120 minutes in the morning and 90-120 minutes in the afternoon dedicated to stuff in my task manager becomes 3-4 hours spent during the 8 hour workday devoted to my OmniFocus task list. I day with a lot of interruptions might get just 2 hours at best but I aim for the 4 hour mark.
I only use dates when dates are assigned by some outside force. E.g. I can’t pay my credit card bill until they’ve provided a monthly statement, but I have to pay it before it’s due - or pay interest. Defer dates can be a little tricky because it’s easy to get into the mindset of “I can’t do that now because of X, but I’ll be able to do that next month”, and then next month arrives and your forecast view is overwhelming because you thought you’d be able to do everything which as well all know no-one can do (at least not in one day!).
Sometimes I put tasks on hold - I have a tag for “not right now”, this is half way between someday maybe and my active task list. These are tasks I will accomplish (usually projects), but right now the timing is not good for me to do them - I have too many projects going on, work is crazy, I’m sick, whatever. This allows me to exclude these projects easily, and everything with this tag is reviewed weekly to see if it should become active again. (Someday maybe is a every 2 weeks to 1 month review for me.)
Do you review deferred actions or ones without Due Dates or deferred dates? I’d hate to have something slip through the cracks, maybe I’ll create a perspective so that doesn’t happen on my end. Also I find the method of repeating defer dates to be a little confusing as there’s “Due Again” which should be for things that have Due Dates but there’s also “repeat every” and “defer another”. Does “repeat again” deal with due items and “defer another” deal with defer dates?
Agreed! Also hi Rose, great to see you in the forum!
This is so true! That’s what I ran into on assigning Due Dates to everything. Sometimes I’d have 50+ tasks that were due which was overwhelming to say the least.
I like this idea, I might try something similar. Is this in place of putting physical projects on hold?
Sounds like a deliberate time of Deep Work in a sense as without it these types of tasks wouldn’t reliably get done. I like it! More people should be willing to do this.
Absolutely right. In a previous time, more specifically a couple years ago while in college, I very rigidly scheduled myself not only with tasks in my calendar from OmniFocus but also everything else in my life. I think I was even to the point where I would schedule when I would be going to sleep or hanging out with friends. On second thought it was concerning now that I look back on it if I’m truly honest. I think the thing I took away from that was that I easily grew frustrated when plans would either dramatically change when I’d already scheduled out the week or I felt that I had an overwhelming amount of things to do and became a slave (pardon my usage of the word, hope you understand my point being made) to my calendar. I think also being able to look at my calendar first thing in the morning before starting on admin work would be useful to see what I have going on during the day. Maybe even something to do the night before.
That’s certainly job specific and your rather lucky you have that work time. Teaching, on the other hand, is not like that, getting time to yourself typically happens before or after school to work on things or during prep periods without students. Sometimes you can get away with getting some stuff done while teaching but I’d rather not bank on it and it depends on the task.
Maybe because I like to be a bit more radical in my usage of my phone when I’m getting critical work done as I’ve been known to put my phone in Airplane mode at various times. A bit extreme but works for me. DND is a good thought though. Maybe a happen medium.
This is my favorite thing I’ve read in a while. Your right it’s one thing to have a task in the action list but scheduling time to work on it or deal with it allows you greater probability of completing it.
It does put the project on hold, but it gives me the “why” of it being on hold - and allows me to easily filter for or exclude these. But yes, I rarely put projects themselves directly on hold :)
Then you will create your own routine. Perhaps just one Admin period of 45 minutes and hopefully one Big Rock period of 45 minutes in the afternoon will do it? Or two blocks of 15 minutes in the morning if you can squeeze it in? This depends on you and your schedule. There are days when I can get my Admin and Big Rock time blocks completed in the morning but I can’t get anything done in the afternoon when life takes over. Or I am just trying to complete all Admin tasks today so that I can do All Big Rocks tomorrow.
I’ll be happy if I can get one Admin 45 block and one Big rock 45 block complete. If not, I’ll try to get at least one 45 minute block (either Admin in Big Rock) to make it a successful day for me. You’ll find own counterpoint of what the minimum number of minutes is for you. I don’t know if my life can get one 60 minute interrupted block in. So I went with 45 minutes. One some days, I go with 30 minute blocks because that’s all I have.
It’s like exercising. Some folks say you should try to get in at least 30 minutes every 2 days or some such rule. I forget. Or you need to drink X ounces of water every day. You squeeze in the water drinking throughout the day when you can.
To me, there are only available tasks that I can do, or unavailable ones that I can’t. Defer dates are tools to move tasks in and out of that state, but are otherwise immaterial.
In other words, it doesn’t matter when a thing became available, it only matters that it is available.
Defer dates are only interesting to me when I’m planning and am looking at things that aren’t available, but which may become available (my radar perspective handles that).
I rarely defer actions or individual tasks but I have about 150 projects that are deferred. They are all recurring projects that happen once a month or once a year but cannot start until a certain time.
For example:
Plan Sheep Breeding is a project that can’t really start until the 4th quarter so it’s deferred until 1 Oct and since it happens yearly I have it in my Recurring Projects Oct-Dec Folder.
Our Mountain Harvest Festival wheer I always have a booth happens in September. I have the project to sign up for a booth, decide what I’m taking and all of that set to start 1 July when I am theoretically done with lambing and can work on it.
I have 5 of these deferred, recurring project folders, one that is the monthly or weekly stuff and one each for each quarter for the yearly things tied to a season.
I have a possibly unusual use of deferred… If there’s a museum exhibit that opens on July 1 and closes Feb 28, I make the opening date the due date and the closing the deferred date. This way I’m frequently reminded once the exhibit opens to remember to go and when I look at deferred’s I’m immediately warned if it’s about to close. This has worked quite well for me!
I’m still figuring out a strategy for more normal usage and am about to read this whole thread fir ideas.
Ok, my English SAT > Math SAT wife agreed with a lot of what I read in this thread … I’m using due and deferred backwards. I’m planning to swap my exhibitions due/deferred entries which I think will still work. Exhibit end date goes to due, exhibit opening date goes to deferred.
I noticed that if I’m in the projects view of OmniFocus 2 (I suppose 3 when it releases on Mac), If I view “remaining” instead of “available” one shows deferred tasks and on hold projects, the other doesn’t.
Agreed. I need to tweak it to my needs and it might very well evolve over time.
Interesting, something for me
Interesting, something for me to think about more and more. Can you share your radar perspective?
@OogieM your use case is unique but I love hearing about it! So interesting!
@jvande interesting use case, unconventional but I like it! Your wife though I think is right, you had the right idea though and it prompted you to be reminded to visit a place for instance before it closes.
Basically, it means any action that is not available, but which could come available without explicit intervention (i.e. they are deferred or are blocked actions in a sequential project). And they are grouped by defer date so that I can see incoming based on proximity (the more I scroll, the further away it is from me, with the exception of “No defer date” at the bottom for blocked).
I have a very similar one.
Difference being, apart of tag names and that mine shows entire projects, the addition of tge line below into the “None of the following:” group:
The difference between due dates and defer dates is that there is some PENALTY for failing to get something done on a due date. Sometimes the penalty is a significant financial one. Other times it’s something as small as feeling bad. Several examples of varying importance:
Tasks with due dates: The CEO of the company personally assigned me to do something by a certain date. He hardly ever asks me to do something personally, so my failure to comply there could get me passed over for promotion and moved to the top of the layoffs list. That’s a big deal. Another example of this category: Paying the mortgage on time. There’ll be a financial penalty and harm to my credit rating if I screw that up.
Another example of a task with a due date: Bringing the empty trash bins back from the curb to the front of the house, every Wednesday. If I don’t do that, it creates a negative impression of the house. We like our neighbors, and want them to think well of us, so I make sure to do that every day. Due date: Every Wednesday.
I also like to bring two bins to the BACK of the house, for convenience. That can wait a couple of days. However, I can’t bring the bins back until after trash pickup, which is Wednesday morning, so that task gets a defer date, and the defer date is every Wednesday.
Interesting! But if you had a parallel project with one action available and another one deferred, that prevents the deferred one from showing. Doesn’t it? Or is that a good thing?
I am a pastor so there are some things that can only be done on Sunday and they must be done on Sunday. To see these things on Tuesday is pointless, I just cannot do them. If 10:45am comes and everything is not done, then it will not get done and I will have another chance the next Sunday. So this is the best example of why I use defer dates.
I also have tasks for my weekly Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday meetings. To see those tasks on other days is pointless. And if they do not get done on their specific day they will come around next week.
I set a defer day only on my personal study items. It is good for me to get these things done but they can be done any time during the week.
