I guess I am comfortable with my use of Omnifocus for tasks and procedures at the ‘ground level’, but I have not found a way to go up for longer term planning up to values.
I think OF does not provide a good structure to manage all the way up and down these different planning ‘altitudes’ which GTD describes. Even GTD is not maybe specific enough on how to do that, at least on the GTD original book.
So I use paper or mindmapping when thinking at this level, not fully integrated with what I have on OF.
I maybe wrong and I would be most interested in knowing the setups that someone who does use OF for high altitude planning uses, in case you want to share it here.
I think you’re correct, OF is not the place to do that long term planning (e.g. deciding that you wish to achieve), but OF is the right place to manage those long range plans. you can use Tags or Folders to gather the projects and tasks which will help you reach those long range goals or targets.
e.g. have a tag called LTG 2022 for anything related to your Long Term Goals which you want to complete in 2022. it also makes it easy to use a perspective to see only those tasks and projects tagged.
thank you @Geoffairey. Do you tag a the folder or project level and the the tasks inherit the tags or you have to manually tag each item which contributes to the LTG?
I’ve been using Evernote for a long time for “vague” goals, information, and resources. I have notes in it in which I add thoughts, ideas and support material. They are linked to tasks in Omnifocus. This also applies to the issue of GTD flight altitudes. Linked notes are also available in Evernote for the weekly review. There is a trigger list in an Evernote notebook, which contains around 150 keywords for the review, a list of points for the next team meeting … and so on. As soon as one of the points becomes concrete, it becomes an ombifocus project or a task. This is how I do it for my area of responsibility at home and at work, my goals for the next 3-4 years and so on …
Maybe I’m an outlier but I’ve used my mind mapping app, iThoughts (MindNode is a popular alternative) for mapping out the general goals and visions for my life. I use it as a “trigger” list to see if there are any areas where I’m lacking projects or progress. I use OmniFocus for the ground level work to create projects and tasks to actually work on my goals and vision.
If you drag an OmniFocus project to an iThought document, it will create a node with the URL link back to the original project.
But then you’d have to control-click on the OmniFocus project in OmniFocus to copy the OmniFocus project URL that you can paste into the notes section of the iThought node. Still a little clumsy but it’s not something I do often to worry about.
I likewise have got stuck trying to go up a level to keep projects aligned with values and longer term goals. I played with Opus One, which is great at that connection, but the interface is not up to speed. It would be great to add a more robust review process within OF.
