OmniOutliner

Ethan on Kinkless and OmniFocus

Merlin — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:02:23 -0400

Hold breath. Exhale. Focus. | Kinkless

I don’t have much to add to Ethan’s (typically entertaining and gracious) post about OmniFocus – an under-development OmniGroup app that will bring Kinkless’ functionality to a stable and powerful Cocoa application. But, ﬁrst off: Yay! The Kinkless is dead! Long live the Kinkless!

Ethan writes:

OmniGroup has been very supportive of kGTD from the beginning, clearly making code tweaks and additions to support this nutty venture. At some point it became clear that the next logical step would be to consider Cocoafying the whole shebang. Having the chance to take everything I’d been thinking and working on with kGTD and see it turned into something bigger and better and brighter is like making a doodle on a piece of paper, handing it to da Vinci and seeing it turned into a full color oil painting. Even better: it’s like Da Vinci letting you sit around and gab at them while they do this and ask for “a bit more cobalt-blue in the sky” and “a few more peasants in that bit on the left”.

While OF is under development, I won’t have much to say publicly about it – I’m superstitious about buying a crib until the baby gets its ﬁrst smack on the ass – but I know the OmniMouth will keep you posted on updates, including when you can expect to see a beta, what the feature set for the ﬁrst cut is likely to include, and so on.

What I will say is that both Ethan and OmniGroup are wonderful to collaborate with. I’m conﬁdent that this will be an app that pulls together the functionality, stability, and polish you associate with OG’s terriﬁc apps.

[Non-disclosure disclosure: Not sure it matters, but if you’re curious, this is not a paying gig for me. Mostly I just stand around like a fat man at a construction site, drinking coffee and shouting pointless suggestions. Ethan and OmniGroup listen patiently, sometimes complying with my random requests, and that’s all the pay I could ever hope for.]

”Ethan on Kinkless and OmniFocus” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 27, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

kGTD tutorials: Projects and actions, Timed actions

Merlin — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:23:15 -0400

KGTD Tutorials - 43FoldersWiki

43F Wiki user ThePolack has been putting together some great kGTD tutorials, including a useful introduction to using the Projects and Actions sections that covers several of the features that most folks only ﬁgure out after a few weeks of regular usage. Handy.

But, I want to especially highlight his tutorial on using timed and dated actions in kGTD. These are powerful features that have caused considerable confusion for users, and ThePolack provides a lucid explanation of how the different events work and how you can use them to manage all those little periodic tasks that pop up in your life.

The whole purpose of GTD is to get these things out of our head and into our trusted organization system. But at the same time, if I enter this particular action into my action list long before I can actually begin work on it, I’ll have to look at it and mentally separate it from the actions that I actually can start working on. It would be nice if I could input these actions into Kinkless, note the start and completion dates for them, and then not have to think about them at all until the appropriate time.

And we can do just that.

Links

”kGTD tutorials: Projects and actions, Timed actions” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 26, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Three cool tricks in Kinkless GTD

Merlin — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:19:58 -0400

Herewith for your approval, a few handy tricks I’ve been discovering for getting the most out of the peerless Omni Outliner Pro/kGTD combo.

And don’t forget – as noted last week – through the end of this month, when you buy any OmniOutliner product from the OmniGroup site, you can use the checkout code 43FOLDERS to get 25% off your order. Disco!

1. “Hiding” fallow projects

In last Thursday’s podcast, “Fallow Projects and the Bread Crumb Trail”, I mentioned how I like to move stalled or clinically-dead projects off my immediate radar screen; it makes it so much easier to focus when only actionable stuff is being tracked actively. Anyhow, lots of people asked for more details on that, so here you go.

In kGTD, you want to create a holding pen for these sick animals by generating a new top-level Project and calling it, say, “Fallow Projects #” (or whatever you prefer, but do include the “pound”) then scooting all those moribund projects thereunder. Cool enough, but, here comes the nifty.

There’s an undocumented feature in kGTD (what, Ethan, now you’re copying a1c0r?) that’s not at all well known. If you type a pound sign (“#”) at the end of a project’s name, kGTD will set that project as “inactive,” meaning that any child tasks – or, awesomely, child projects – will not have their tasks populated into context lists, next actions, or iCal calendars.

This is really useful in practice, because, say you have a project going great guns, with 5 sub-projects and manifest next actions popping up all over the place. But, then, for whatever reason – perhaps the notional rodeo maiming mentioned in the podcast – you need to ﬂash freeze the project in situ for an unknown period of time. This solution lets you move things out of your way – as-is – so you don’t have to undo all your work to date by ﬂipping off individual contexts or, God forbid, deleting the projects and then needing to start over later. It’s all still there ready to be reanimated simply by moving the sub-project out of the inactive parent. Sexy time.

2. Color your world

In “KGTD Settings,” when you ﬁrst set the “Calendars to Create or Sync with,” you select the contexts that you want to appear in iCal as well as the names for each calendar. Handy enough. What you may not know is that, if kGTD is creating the iCal calendars from scratch, you can also select the color of each calendar as it will appear in iCal. Yay, pretty.

Just select the line with the calendar you want to colorify, and hit CMD-1 to bring up the “Appearance” palette. Click the “Background Color” button and select the color you like.

While being semantically useless, it’s a nice way to create visual similarity in related calendars. You could even use it as a kind of meta-category beyond what you do already with calendar groups. Maybe all the things you can do in a parked car are “Seagreen” and all the tasks that require a ﬂat surface are “Darkslateblue.” Be creative. Or, you know, just color for fun.

(NB: this only works when kGTD is creating calendars that don’t yet exist in iCal. Use care when deleting existing calendars in order to play with this trick; remember “calls” can be non-kGTD appointments, right? Right.).

3. That curious “Twin” button

Averse as the average adult human is to reading documentation, it’s perhaps not surprising that every single kGTD user I know (except you, of course; you’re really smart) has no idea what that “Twin” button in their document bar does. Perhaps it generates a doppelganger, phones Hayley Mills, or adds a side-splitting DeVito/Schwarzenegger movie to your Netﬂix queue. Gratefully, “No,” “No,” and “Holy crap, no.”

The “Twin” button is simply a fast way to move back and forth between a synced task’s dual lives as 1) the child of a Project, and 2) a constituent of a given context-based list.

Remember the idea of kGTD is to plan in Projects and then work in contexts. But the occasional moving back and forth becomes a breeze when you place your cursor in any synced task then mash the “Twin” button. Try it. It’s really cool, and now you’ll be using it all the time, conﬁdent of no Schwarzenegger-related media involvement whatsoever.

”Three cool tricks in Kinkless GTD” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 26, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

OmniOutliner in law school, and an appreciation of OmniGroup

Merlin — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 07:56:20 -0400

Using OmniOutliner Pro and Kinkless GTD in Law School

Erik Schmidt has a useful post on how he’s using OmniOutliner Pro and Kinkless GTD in law school. His explanation of kGTD is succinct and nicely captures the economy of using a simple system to track projects and tasks.

But, I think his section on law school note-taking and planning is a particularly good read for anyone who could use OO for similar purposes – he highlights how you can adapt a basic structure (in his case, reading arranged by time/syllabus order, and notes arranged by class), but then have lots of ﬂexibility via things like drag and drop:

I keep all of my casebriefs and class notes in one OmniOutliner document for each class. This helps me as exam time approaches, because I already have my class notes and casebriefs in the same outline. OmniOutliner Pro gives me the ability to segment my notes by topic, while still managing them all in the same document. This is incredibly useful, because it provides context. It also makes it very easy to add or modify notes from last Wednesday’s class when my Torts professor (invariably) refers back to a prior case when discussing today’s reading.

It may seem like using one massive outline for each class could rapidly create hairballs. It takes some getting used to, but OmniOutliner’s nesting capabilities and drag and drop repositioning make it easy to sort notes in a clean hierarchical fashion. Later, when it’s time to put together that “class outline” that everyone is always obsessing over, you can simply make a copy of your existing class outline (I always like to have a copy of the orginal, because I’m paranoid), then start trimming it down for use as your study outline.

A good read – maybe a really good one if you’re in a fast-paced environment and are looking for ways to keep everything wrangled in one, non-Byzantine system.

OmniGroup really has a way with making products that work the way you hope they would – where you just try something and it magically just works. Kind of like having a silent and obsequious concierge inside your Mac. URLs and email addresses turn into clickable links; dragged-and-dropped Finder documents are iconized and their contents are added to the document; type “now” or “next week” in a date ﬁeld and it knows what you mean. High-touch stuff like that. Like Quicksilver, Transmit, and NetNewsWire, to name just a few, it feels like a modern Mac app for people who love OS X.

Anyhow, random unpaid pimp for OmniGroup. I just like that they respect their users’ love of the Mac and seem to go out of their way to make things that feel right under contemporary ﬁngers.

”OmniOutliner in law school, and an appreciation of OmniGroup” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 20, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My kGTD setup

Merlin — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 08:03:42 -0500

Related to today’s earlier post, a number of people have written over the past few weeks with curiosity about kGTD (“Is it worth buying OmniOutliner Pro?” “Is it worth buying a Mac?” “Will I be able to vanquish all foes?”). While I’m not prepared to do a major sales presentation, I am happy to oblige the folks who wanted to see how I’ve set mine up. Also gives you a little window into my current contexts (as well as my atrocious personal habits).

Screenshot here (best viewed full size): comments and questions will be entertained.

”My kGTD setup” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 07, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"