After you set up your geographical contexts, just click the “context locator” icon in the lower bar and you’ll see something like this: Nearby contexts in OmniFocus for iPhone Is much more complicated to describe the process, than to use it, that I can assure. By choosing this, your context will always be available, regardless if your actual geographical location. But one completely neat feature is the “Always Available” function. When choosing “Current Location”, your context will be assigned to the actual geographical location. You can do this for any context when you’re editing it: Edit your contexts in OmniFocus Suppose you go to you office every day, and your office is not your home (as it is mine, for instance), you can actually assign to your office location an OmniFocus context. OmniFocus uses the GPS facilites of the new iPhone 3G, meaning that you can physically assign latitude and longitude to a place you are frequently using, transforming it into a work context. The most important icons are those after the home icon: the context locator (also know as “nearby” context) and the sync igniter. So, since the main screen is self explanatory, let’s take a closer look to the lower bar. That lower bar is available all over the application. Another noticeable thing is the lower sidebar, which features icons for nearby contexts, syncing, and quick add an action to Inbox. Being able to see on the home screen how many tasks are due soon, how many are overdue and how many important (flagged) tasks you have is such a time saver. Projects and Contexts are just usual handles for task management, so these are pretty self explanatory, but what you can see at a glance in the home screen is also the time constraint for your activities. But a picture is worth a thousand words (have I already said that?) so here is how the home screen of OmniFocus looks like: OmniFocus home screen OmniFocus lets you add your Projects, fill them with Actions, assign them to Contexts, and see when and where you can do them. In short, by using GTD you are doing stuff (Actions) grouped together (Projects) in specific locations (Contexts) and by taking one step at a time (Next Actions). For those of you unaware of this concept, GTD is a methodology invented by David Allen, which can dramatically boost one’s personal productivity. The first and the most important thing about OmniFocus is its compliance with the GTD methodology. Also, I must say that the intended audience for this goes from the unexperienced iPhone user who wants to increase personal productivity to the moderate GTD follower, so if you fall between these categories, give it a read. I expect this post to be rather big, so put aside some time to read it. I dare to say that OmniFocus wouldn’t be what it is today without the advices and know-how of those GTD gurus.īut enough with praises, and let’s start reviewing OmniFocus for iPhone. Maybe this is why OmniGroup made some very interesting moves back in 2006-2007, bringing into the development team of what they called at that time Omni Fu the icon GTD blogger Merlin Mann, and the maker of a popular GTD implementation called Kinkless, Ethan Schoonover. As for OmniPlan, it was a key factor in big projects, when I used to run my own online publishing business.īut from a large structure planning application to a personal organizer implementing GTD there is quite a gap, and one cannot expect to apply the same knowledge in both areas. I used OmniOutliner a lot until I shifted to mind mapping but I still use it from time to time even today.
Omnifocus icons mac#
OmniGroup, the makers of OmniFocus, are well known in the Mac world for their OmniOutliner and OmniPlan products. Not only because it won the Apple Awards for Best iPhone Productivity Application in 2008, but because is a really useful piece of software. And I would say that this popularity is well deserved by OmniFocus. A simple Google search for omnifocus is revealing more than 220.000 results (as of October 2008), which, for a personal task manager application, is a lot.