2020-03-04 – OmniFocus Workflows with Eric Bowers

Mortgage loan officer, novelist, and musician, Eric Bowers, joined us from Florida to share his simple, yet highly effective approach to OmniFocus.

Eric Bowers

Eric Bowers is an experienced OmniFocus user who has honed his setup and workflows over the years with some help from Learn OmniFocus. His productive use of his Apple gear and apps helps him pursue a variety of fun and meaningful pursuits in his life and work.

Session Overview

Eric shared how he’s using OmniFocus in combination with Fantastical and other productivity apps to manage his life and work. Topics covered include:

  • Eric’s overarching practice of managing time, not tasks to maintain a system that’s effective and as simple as possible.
  • Why he switched from Things to OmniFocus.
  • Why and how he uses his calendar app of choice, Fantastical, as his daily driver and where OmniFocus comes into play.
  • How he uses emojis to distinguish between tags that represent metadata and those that are being used for traditional GTD contexts.
  • His strategy for implementing checklists in OmniFocus.
  • The role that other productivity apps, including Ulysses and MindNode, play in his system and why defining these roles is essential.
  • How he uses the same conventions in multiple apps to make switching between apps as easy as possible.
  • Why he uses a new app from the Iconfactory called Tot to quickly and easily capture things that have his attention.
  • How he keeps the number of actions in OmniFocus manageable.
  • And more…

About Eric Bowers

Eric Bowers wears many hats. His diverse life and work span many different areas, including:

  • Financial Industry — Eric has been working in the financial industry for two decades. He enjoys helping people and uses OmniFocus to help provide outstanding service to his clients while maintaining a healthy balance between work and other areas of life.
  • Artistic Pursuits — He’s also a bass player and singer who writes original material, mostly for his own amusement. And he’s halfway to completing a sci-fi/drama novel called “The Mayor of Blackout County”, slated for release in December 2020.
  • Podcast and Writing Gigs — Eric was recently a guest on The Omni Show, where he talked about how he uses OmniFocus for everything from pool maintenance to his day job. He also wrote an article for Inside OmniFocus, On Managing Life, and contributed an article entitled How MindNode Propels Eric Forward – Writing a Novel to the MindNode blog.
  • Bowers Voice — When not working on his new novel, Eric posts on his personal blog, Bowers Voice. He has a reputation as an Apple nerd amongst his friends and family, and, not surprisingly, many of his blog posts centre around Apple technologies and OmniFocus.
  • Three Dog Night — Eric lives in Florida with his wife and is a “dog dad” to three little canines. He’s also been known to do impressions, sometimes even professionally.

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