Hello. One thing I miss about paper planners is the ability to have a weekly view and a monthly view of my tasks. These are tasks that have to get done “sometime” in this week or month, so I don’t want to lose track of them, but I don’t want/need to specify exactly when they get done. Here is the process I would like to use:
when I do my daily planning, look at the weekly task list, and decide if something from there should/could be done today. Same thing for the monthly list.
If it is done when I plan for it to be done, it is marked off but isn’t associated with the weekly or monthly list anymore - I don’t need to clog up a project called “Week” or whatever.
If it is not done, it stays in the weekly list, and moves ahead a week if I don’t get to it this week.
I have read some older threads about this, and I don’t know if they apply, and I also don’t need to reconsider how I work. This workflow has worked for me for a long time.
(I’m assuming you are asking how to implement the process you have described in OmniFocus)
My first thought was that to create a task that should be done this week, you can just set the due date to be the end of this week. However, I can’t find a way to create a perspective that shows everything due this week (is there really no way to do this?).
Instead, you could create a tag that means “should be done this week”. You can then look at everything that is tagged with this in the Tags perspective, or create your own perspective so that you can get more picky.
The same method would work for tasks that need to be done this month. You could even have a perspective for tasks that need to be done this month but don’t need to be done this week, so you don’t get duplication between the two lists you check.
Just to address a few points you raised: you don’t need to specify exactly when tasks are to be done; if you mark a task complete it will no longer show up in your perspectives (with the usual settings); and if there’s a task you wanted to get done last week but didn’t manage to, with the method I described you actually don’t need to do anything, because the task is already tagged with “due this week”!
I decided to use OmniFocus as my “menu.” It stores all of my projects and tasks. I have a custom perspectives that shows a list of all available actions. At the beginning of the week, I choose a list of tasks that I want to get done in the next week. I wrote those down in my BuJo.
I also choose 2-3 Big Rock projects for the week. Then I write down the next 3-5 tasks in each project into my BuJo.
I experimented with this workflow here:
In the end, OmniFocus is my second brain. It stores all of my projects and tasks. My BuJo became my weekly and daily driver. This is how I drive my week and day.
I love this idea of using both OF and a BuJo. I often find myself wanting to put things down on paper, even though I have all of these digital devices. The “brain” thing makes total sense - there’s no way I could keep track of everything in an analog journal. that’s why I went digital in the first place. But this method of having the digital be a repository and then you get to write out the actual plan is really smart. Thanks for sharing.
It takes time to figure out what you will want in a two page spread. I don’t use all of the BuJo methods as described in the book. Nor do I go all out with beautiful layouts and illustrations. You will experiment in your page layout and eventually settle into something comfortable for your situation.
The trick is to use the weekly review to determine the one-off tasks, repeating tasks, and the Big Rock projects.
Then use the daily review (at the end of the day for me) to update OF3 and add tasks to the BuJo to course correct throughout the week.
One thing I’ve noticed about using OmniFocus + BuJo is to help me get to work on tasks/projects that have no real due date. I keep OmniFocus for my repository and to also trigger notifications. OmniFocus dings at me when a task is scheduled to start and/or when a due date/time is reached. This is helpful for my repeating tasks.
My BuJo helps me with all the other tasks and projects that don’t have notifications, defer dates, or due dates. I choose a handful of tasks and projects that I want to work on this week and write them down in the BuJo. When I encounter an open time block, I look at the BuJo and choose from the list I wrote down at the beginning of the week. I no longer spend 2-5 minutes looking inside OF3 for the next perfect task (hint: there is no such as the next perfect task to work on now). I just look at my smaller list in the BuJo for what I want to work on next.
