Kourosh Dini's Blog, page 17

A Podcast with the Omni Show

I had a wonderful time talking with Andrew Mason as part of the Omni Show.

Have a listen to [the podcast here](https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/how-ps...).

The Omni Show focuses on people who use the Omni Group’s products. It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of their applications.

In the episode, I talk about task management, the role OmniFocus plays in it, as well as a bit about music, too.

Calm Piano – Anniversary

I worked this piece out over the summer.  Often, I come across different structures that don’t seem to last. They sound nice briefly, and then I just lose their vitality. Others stick around.

So far so good with this one.

It’s titled “Anniversary”.

Alight

Why Care?

# Why Care?

Why should we care about the work in front of us?

This may appear to be an absurd question. The reasons should be obvious. But any time the words “should” and “obvious” appear in a sentence, I quite often find it useful to take a closer look.

When we care about something, we pay attention to it. Further, we pay a depth of attention. The greater that investment, the greater the care.

Meanwhile, as we sustain attention on something, we tend to find more meaning in it. Meaning is someth...

The Tyranny of Efficiency

The existence of a world of productivity, the books, the articles, the talking heads (including myself), all point to an unspoken assumption that productivity is always a good thing. 1 While there is utility to learning how to focus, how to decide where and how to do work, and even learning how to get to the things you enjoy, perhaps there is a dark side to it as well.

When I first encountered Getting Things Done, I began to marry it to OmniOutliner’s kGTD (the OmniFocus precursor). The prom...

The Fear of Losing Control to our Tools

Caution & Definition

Any tool, whether physical, digital, or mental, requires some form of caution.

We must recognize our intentions as separate from the tools we use to develop them. It is we ourselves who form the intentions and are ultimately responsible for them. This may seem obvious, but in practice, it is not.

Michael Schechter of a Better Mess wrote two fine posts called Clarifying Productivity and The Error of the App Mentality, spawned from a OneThirtySeven post and a twitter discussio...

Channels of Work

Another question I received after the recent webinar at Learn OmniFocus was to clarify the Land & Sea Project in terms of the number of channels one can use.

For details on the Land & Sea project, see the video at about 1:06:43. Its creation and use are more explicitly laid out on p706 of Creating Flow with OmniFocus 2nd ed.

 

A Question About The Land & Sea Projects

Hi Kourosh,

 

… I have a question regarding the Land & Sea project. I’ve been working to implement this project in my own system. ...

Grouping Tasks by Session

Useful Lists

We can easily be overwhelmed by looking at even a realistic list of things we’d like to do today. This is particularly the case if there are many small tasks. A good list is one we can easily review in a short period of time so that we can make a clear decision about what to do next. For this to be the case, we generally need a short list.

However, this pushes against two other productivity tenets:

Tasks should be clear and specific.
One should offload as much as possible into a tr...

Being Deliberate with Task Wording

How we word our tasks can make a significant difference in how we approach them. For example, several rules of thumb may be:

Start with a verb
Maintain both simplicity and clarity when possible
Act as though you are delegating the task to someone else. (In fact, you are delegating to your future self.)

In the last post, Grouping Tasks by Session, I showed my Dashboard Perspective:

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On Twitter, Brandon Pittman asked me what’s the difference between “Read book” and “Read: book”. I said, “not m...

A Principle of Completable Lists

We can have any number of types of task lists, be they a perspective, a context, or a project. Some lists stick around: the daily list, phone calls to make, things to file, agenda items, and more. They fill up, we clear them, and they fill up again.

Two questions we can ask when approaching any list are:

Do I intend to complete this list?
If so, how often?

These questions are useful because completable lists affect us differently. When we can arrange a list to be completed regularly, we effect...