I’ve been using OmniFocus for a very long time. I organize my tasks into projects set up as “single action lists.” Up until now, I haven’t used projects with sequential or parallel structures. When I see a task in OmniFocus in the morning - like today’s task: “Prepare for the fiber-optic connection installation at our house by the middle of next week” - I map out the individual steps and time estimates in iCal. That way, I have a complete overview of all tasks (including those for the current week) at a glance.
How do you manage this with sequential projects? Do you always have to access the project via the Project perspective? If a project’s next task only appears in the “Today” perspective after I mark the previous one as complete, how do I maintain an overview of the whole picture? I’d appreciate a few details on how you handle this.
Dear Tim Stringer,
thank you very much for your quick response. I already understand how projects can be structured in OmniFocus. My post was more about my concern that I might misjudge the urgency of tasks from sequential projects in my “Today” view. Somewhere in my extensive daily list, a very simple task pops up in the morning, and I decide, “Never mind, I’ll do it later,” because—due to a stressful situation—I don’t realize that it belongs to a sequential project and that postponing it blocks an entire, very important project.
This morning I implemented a simple solution (suggested by Google AI). I’ll start using sequential projects again, but from now on I’ll mark them with an emoji as the first character in the project name, so that I can recognize at a glance that a task belongs to a sequential project—and even its priority. (Projectnames are now also displayed as a column in all my perspectives.)
🔴 Red Circle: High priority or blocked tasks
🟡 Yellow Circle: Medium priority
🟢 Green Circle: Low-risk projects
I use OmniFocus as my daily menu. All my due items automatically show up in forecast. Overdue items show up in the past due and I work on overdue first before getting to my forecast tagged items. If I have too many overdue tasks in the forecast, then I won’t add a sequential project to focus on tomorrow. I can add available tasks by setting a planned date for tomorrow. That takes care of admin work for tomorrow.
Warning: do not plan any more tasks if there are a lot of due/overdue tasks on your plate. Do not add a time block to work on a sequential project unless your due items are finished. It’s probably better to just plan 3 to 5 tasks in addition to your due tasks. Life has a funny way of adding more to your plate throughout the day.It’s better to have buffer time. I have space for life’s daily emergencies.
For sequential projects, I time block them. I make 30-90 minute time blocks on my calendar. I set up a calendar event with an alert set to 5 minutes prior. The alert reminds me to start switching my mindset to focus on a sequential project. I’ll go to OmniFocus project perspective and choose the one project to focus on. I have the project perspective set to show all remaining tasks. Then I’ll work from there. I don’t want to see any of the other available tasks or the forecast perspective.
In my weekly review, I’d like to look at my schedule and see where I can time block 30 to 90 minutes throughout the week to work on a sequential project. I want to reserve time throughout the week to work on that project. Progress is made in that focused project throughout the week.
I’ve found the forecast perspective better for single tasks and the project perspective to work on a single project.
an alternative would be to create a custom perspective, showing all available project projects and show remaining tasks. This is called my big rocks perspective. I switch to this perspective and then choose the one project to work on that can be an alternative to using the project’s perspective which shows all projects. Showing all projects can be distracting. The big rocks perspective only shows available projects. It’s a smaller subset and much less distracting.
You mentioned the “Today” perspective in your original post. Do you have a custom perspective called “Today”, or are you going to the Forecast perspective and clicking on Today?
I’m curious why you only use Single Action Lists and map out the steps in the Calendar app. Is the action in a Single Action List essentially a placeholder for a project with the actions time blocked in your calendar? Might it be simpler to use parallel/sequential projects for something with a defined outcome?
I rarely use sequential projects in practice, though they can be helpful if things need to happen in a specific order. An alternative is to have a parallel project with a sequential action group. This provides the best of both worlds by allowing you to track what can be done at any point in the project’s life cycle alongside actions that need to happen in a specific order.
I’ll be curious to hear how it goes with the circle tasks. I would think this could get to be tedious to manage.
I work with many custom perspectives (TASKS TODAY, PRIORITIES, CLARIFY, WEEKLY COMPASS, DEADLINES, RADAR SCREEN, etc.). For me, using sequential projects poses a problem because I have to carefully check every task to ensure it isn’t confused with a task from a single-action list. How do you tell—within your perspective views—whether a task comes from a sequential project or a single-action list?
I use a huge number of tags (Today, This Week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… This Month, September, October, November, December, 2027, January, February… 2028, 2029, 2030, Future…) and so on. I also use priority tags, such as “🐸 Eat that Frog” (I’m not a vegan), “🔥 A-TASKS I must do,” “‼️ B-TASKS I should do,” “🫠 C-TASKS are nice to do”…
This structure of weekly and monthly tags makes it easy to plan my time effectively. I always use this to create my calendar schedule 1–2 weeks in advance using split-screen view.
I’m going to stick with my current method. As part of my weekly planning, I drag the tasks I need to complete into iCal and create detailed steps there for completing the projects. I’m opting out of sequential and parallel projects; my experiments with them last week didn’t offer any real advantage.
I’ve noticed that I’m using the Forecast perspective more for single actions and admin routine tasks.
I’m working either in one of two modes:
Admin mode
Project mode
I’ll set up a time block in my calendar app to make progress on single one-off tasks and admin work. I have one in the morning and one in the afternoon. That takes cares of my day job work.
I do schedule a 60-90 minute time block to work on a sequential project. When the time comes, I’ll go to that project and just work from there.
I am curious to see Kanban coming to OmniFocus. I think I’ll use the list view as seen in today’s OmniFocus to work on my admin work. Then I’ll switch to whatever this new kanban feature looks like to work on a sequential project. I’d imagine that we can see the remaining actions in a kanban card layout. It’ll be an interesting time to see this feature eventually come out. But in the meantime, I’m still churning away at admin work and then switch to a focused project during my scheduled time block.
I use projects (sequential and parallel) for any desired outcome that takes more than one concrete step to accomplish. The project name is the intended outcome (e.g. “Schedule Fall 2027 courses”).
A sequential project is one that is strongly path dependent: for example, when I’m reviewing a book, my actions are generally:
Wait to receive Author, Title [I create this action with a “Waiting” tag so I can be reminded to contact the journal or publisher if the book doesn’t arrive]
Read and take notes on Author, Title
Draft review of Author, Title
Revise review of Author, Title
Submit review of Author, Title
In the case of a review, I can’t do any of the steps until I’ve completed the preceding one, which is why I use a sequential project. For other projects, such as researching and writing a chapter, it’s possible to be working on several aspects at once, at least until a certain stage, so for those I use a parallel project (though for a short writing project, once a piece enters production I might change it to a sequential project).
I mostly use OF on my Mac, I usually have the Inspector open, and I have the Forecast perspective set to show the project as a column, so when I look at my Forecast for today, I can see what project is associated with each action.
However, the primary way I maintain an overview of the whole picture is through regular weekly reviews of active projects (or more frequent reviews, in the case of urgent projects). For each project, I assess whether I’m making reasonable progress and whether I’ve defined enough actions to keep the project moving for another week.
Doing regular reviews helps keep me from focusing too much on what is urgent and not enough on what is important but not urgent. It also keeps me from planning excessively, which can get in the way of actually doing things. That’s one insight that I took from Getting Things Done when I first read it: the kind of meticulous planning that’s required for a large team-based project is often overkill for personal projects.
Thanks for your post. In retrospect, I realized I hadn’t described my issue with sequential projects in OmniFocus precisely enough. I am certainly capable of managing “sequential” projects—though I’ve always handled that in iCal until now. In OmniFocus, I treat the “project” itself as a simple task (e.g., currently “Activate fiber-optic connection”). In iCal, I list the individual steps leading up to the task’s due date in detail. For my personal life alone, I currently have about 170 tasks in OmniFocus (many of them recurring, such as bleeding radiators, renewing my rail discount card, preparing my tax return, etc.) spread across 45 projects, each consisting of just a single task. I used to use sequential projects in OmniFocus and mix them with a large number of personal and professional tasks. When looking at the daily task list in my “TASKS TODAY” perspective, it was tedious to distinguish at a glance whether a task was a simple, standalone item or the current step of a project. I had to display the project names in the perspective and then—for a task like “Buy folders with labels,” for instance—check whether it was part of a project or just a reminder to get supplies for filing old personal documents.
I’m currently running a test. I’m creating sequential projects and prefixing their names with an emoji or symbol (e.g., “[✅ Organize stack of documents]”). Now, when I look at my many upcoming tasks for “Today,” “This Week,” and “This Month,” I can see at a glance which tasks belong to a project and which are standalone tasks. Let’s see if that solves my problem…
