Productivity on Flo's Thoughts

Overwhelming Task Management

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 19:17:47 +0200

Mr. OmniFocus aka David Sparks started a new series on his blog about the hurdles one might face when dealing with task management systems. I recently switched from Things to OmniFocus and faced some problems as well. After years with the German task management application I had acquired a workflow which did not translate well to OmniFocus.

In Things, everything’s basically always available and you schedule tasks for certain days or hand pick the ones you want to work on on a certain day. In OmniFocus, it makes more sense to defer everything until you realistically think that you’ll get around to working on it. This way, tasks will only be visible to you when you really need to take action. This of course is a setting and can be adjusted as needed.

This became most clear to me when I started looking for an equivalent of Things’s Today View. There is no such thing. With the pro version of OmniFocus it’s fairly easy to create a perspective that will show you all available items. The Forecast (available in the regular version as well) will show everything that becomes available that day. If you forget to tick something off that day it won’t be there the next. So this is where the ‘available list’ comes in handy.

David recently did a course for Lynda.com on OmniFocus in which he explains how he set up his today list among others.

Why the iPad Became My Main Computer

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 13:41:20 +0200

Federico Viticci:

Think about the iPad this way: would a college student who needs to download a file from a school’s web server and write an essay in Pages while looking up two PDFs really enjoy an iPad? I don’t think so. Would a chef who wants to compare orders for her kitchen open 5 windows in Preview for OS X or jump back and forth between files on a third-party app for iPad? She’d just sit down at an iMac and use Preview. But would an iPad make sense for some tasks in those two use cases? Would the portability of an iPad be welcome in the student’s backpack or the chef’s countertop? Absolutely.

Federico from MacStories shares his personal story and how he manages to use the iPad as his main work machine. I find myself trying to use the iPad more every now and then and it works for me in a pretty limited scope. To see how it can be used if you really want to is pretty impressive.

Creating Tons of Tasks for Keeping Track of the Series You're Watching

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 19:38:31 +0200

Since I started watching “How I Met Your Mother” somewhen the last two weeks I was wondering how I should keep track of the episodes I’ve already seen. So I spent a few minutes googling. I assume there are some web services or apps that do that for you. But I neither wanted to sign up for another service nor did I want another app for that.

“Why not add all the episodes to Things?”, I thought. That would make perfect sense for me since Things is the application I’m using for all the tasks one can tick off. Yeah, I love making lists and ticking off things to see the progress I made.

I remembered Things is fully scriptable so I decided to build a quick and dirty AppleScript to batch-create all these tasks. Hope this helps someone.

tell application "Things"	
 repeat with theSeasonValue from 1 to 6
 repeat with theEpisodeValue from 1 to 22
 set epsiodeIdentifier to ("S" & theSeasonValue as string) & "E" & theEpisodeValue as string
 set newToDo to make new to do with properties {name:"HIMYM " & epsiodeIdentifier} at end of area "Serien"
 end repeat
 end repeat
end tell