Configure OmniFocus to Reflect Your Life and Work

Your OmniFocus structure must be a reflection of your life and work. This includes creating folders representing different areas of your life, adding single action lists to house one-off actions in these areas, and creating parallel and sequential projects to track outcomes you’re working towards.

The Start Smart with OmniFocus 4 course is a good place to start. In addition to learning the basics of OmniFocus, you’ll be guided through setting up OmniFocus. This course is for everyone, whether you’re new to OmniFocus or have been using it for years.

The next step is to complete OmniFocus 4: Beyond the Basics. This course picks up where Start Smart with OmniFocus leaves off and helps you further configure OmniFocus. You’ll learn to create custom perspectives that can be very helpful for using, reviewing and maintaining OmniFocus.

A good question to ask is “What do I want to get out of OmniFocus?”. Identify the lists you want OmniFocus to show you, then work backwards to build a system that delivers them. Read our article (Members), What Do You Want to Get OUT of OmniFocus? for practical guidance that will help inform your use of things like folders, tags and dates.

Custom Perspectives (available in the Pro edition of OmniFocus) can be very helpful for leveraging this organization and automatically generating helpful task lists. Our Custom Perspectives for OmniFocus directory includes some of our favourite perspectives. If you’re on a Mac, you can easily download and install these perspectives and use them on all your devices.

Do you have questions about OmniFocus? Would you like to connect with other OmniFocus users? Our Learn OmniFocus LIVE sessions allow you to meet other OmniFocus users and get assistance as you setup and use OmniFocus. You’re very welcome to attend, whether you’re new to OmniFocus or an OmniFocus aficionado.