I was wondering if people had suggestions or strategies for using OmniFocus with an additional/external task tracking system.
As a software developer, software projects I work on in GitHub use Issues to track tasks to be completed. This is essentially a list of actions/tasks outside of OmniFocus.
This, of course means my ‘trusted system’ is split between OF and GitHub and when looking at OmniFocus projects and actions, it’s difficult to get the full picture of everything I need to do.
That’s my particular case, but more generally I’d appreciate suggestions on working with OF and any additional task tracking system.
If you are in a similar situation, what approach do you use to handle having a split between OF and another task tracking system?
Any work that is in GitHub stays in GitHub. When I look at projects, I decide if the project is better suited for GitHub. Things like version tracking, collaboration, and issue tracking are important for mostly digital-based projects.
Any work that is not digital in nature (home renovations, planning a party event, tracking housekeeping duties) are better suited in OmniFocus for me. OmniFocus is a personal task manager and is not suited for collaboration and issue tracking. If I don’t intend to share a project, I’m comfortable with using OmniFocus.
I’ve learn to decide where a project resides and put it into the appropriate manager. I’m not a fan of duplicating tasks in two different systems. That’s just more maintenance work to focus on if I had to remember to update in GitHub and OmniFocus.
I do schedule time blocks to work on GitHub projects and other time blocks to work on OmniFocus projects. Balancing time to work on projects from two systems works for me when I use time blocking methods.
OmniFocus has the review perspective and it makes it easy to review my projects in a timely basis.
I set up a schedule to review GitHub projects. Projects that has frequent changes gets a shorter review cycle (maybe Monday, Wednesday, Friday). Other projects can be reviewed weekly.
My preference is to have everything in one system, (as per the GTD methodology) regardless of where the task is ‘generated’. Ideally I would try and automate everything to talk to Omnifocus, but if that has to be done manually then so be it.
Is it possible to use something like Zapier to set up a ‘trigger / action’ sequence to send Github tasks to Omnifocus?
not quite the same, but I have the same issue with Fibery, which my org uses. I set up a zapier trigger to send any new items to my OF inbox. This way I only have one task inbox, even though I do have to actually ‘do work’ in fibery. Not sure if somethign similar is possible with GitHub. Of course, all of us really have probably half a dozen or more inboxes considering emails, messages, etc. So you could just add checking GH to your regular review of inboxes.
As others have mentioned, OF is a personal task management system. GitHub issues, Jira and others are collaborative systems. Ultimately, you will need to document things in GitHub issues for it to be collaborative.
There are two strategies I’ve used for this in the past.
One is have a general placeholder in OF like “Review & work on Github issues”. I can still prioritize my personal work, including the GitHub issues, but the details of those issues stays in GitHub.
The other is a bit of duplication. I can write a script to capture the tasks assigned to me in GitHub and create tasks in OF with them. Each task has a link to the original GitHub issue, but this gives me a little more clarity than the generic one. It also allows me to break down the issue into sub tasks that I may work on locally if the issue is reasonably large. I typically have at least a task group for the issue in OF with the last task being to update the GitHub issue, since that is where I share status collaboratively.
There are pros and cons to each approach. In general if the GitHub issues are fairly small workable chunks rather than mini projects in their own right, I use the original version. If they are larger efforts, I’ll break it down in OF as I described in the second case. Some dev tools like Jira allow a developer to create subtasks in the tool itself, so I keep them there & simply reference them like the first approach in OF. The balance is avoiding duplication, but also divergence where you need to manually sync between systems. While the first version doesn’t have a lot of detail in OF, it avoids the divergence/duplication issues. The second approach is more prone to duplication, so be careful with it.
