How does one schedule meetings with OmniFocus 3? I have started using OmniFocus using your the book “Creating Flow with OmniFocus 3” from Kourosh Dini as a guide. And came to a situation which is puzzling me: how to schedule meetings? I wanted to schedule a meeting for the first time in OmniFocus and discovered that it isn’t possible. Or is it? Apparently, from what I could understand so far, we need to use a separate calendar app that is linked to OmniFocus. Is that correct?
I used the search function in my pdf reader to find more information in the book about how to do that, but couldn’t really find any. And that puzzled me. Is it there and, for some reason, I couldn’t find it? Or did he consider this information to be obvious and therefore doesn’t need to be written about?
What increased my “puzzledness” even more, was that I also couldn’t find anything about this in any of the official OmniFocus support websites, the online manual, nor the User Forum here on Discourse. The closest I could find was in this message: https://support.omnigroup.com/of-and-calendar/ , where it says: “OmniFocus isn’t meant to be a calendar replacement, but rather a calendar complement. The calendar does well when it comes to keeping tabs on events that happen at a specific place and time. However, many of our tasks don’t schedule so neatly—that’s where OmniFocus comes into play.” Why is the interplay between OmniFocus and a calendar app considered to be so unimportant that the people who developed and the ones who use it don’t even mention it? Or was I just unable to find the information?
@CrisRich I sort of break the (GTD) rules a bit here. I use both calendar and OF to manage and schedule my meetings, naughty boy that I am!
I like to have meetings in both Cal/OF as a comfort and extra level of security for my needs.
I am a church minister and small businessman and keeping these plates spinning all the time is tricky.
I have an appointments project and tag, coupled with carefully customised perspective options that let me see approaching meetings/appointments in various OF perspectives. It does ‘double-up’ on data entry due to calendars interleaved with the Forecast but my phobia is comforted by that fact (to be fair I rarely use the Forecast view anyway I tend to live out my life on perspectives)!
It’s not for everyone but it only takes one meeting to be forgotten for your whole world to collapse!
That is correct. While OmniFocus supports a number of different approaches to productivity, it was developed in keeping with the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach developed by David Allen. Allen advocates using a calendar for things that must happen on a particular day or at a particular time, and lists organized by the place you need to be or the tools you need to do them (tags) to keep track of things that don’t need to be done on a particular day or at a particular time, even if they have a deadline.
On MacOS and iOS, OmniFocus interacts with the native calendar system. On my Mac I find that the built-in Calendar app serves my needs. I use Readdle’s Calendar 5 app on my iPhone because I have to work with a university Exchange server, and adding my Exchange account at the system level on my personal iPhone gives more access and deletion privileges to my university’s IT administrators than I like.
At the beginning of every day, I review my calendar for the “hard” tasks, meetings, appointments, etc., do work required to prep for them, and then turn to OmniFocus for the next thing to do. If I can prep for a meeting in advance, the prep work goes into OF with the meeting as its due date and time.
