Productivity expert Mike Williams joined Tim Stringer to share practical strategies for using OmniFocus to achieve sustainable productivity.
This session with Tim Stringer, founder of Learn OmniFocus, and Mike Williams, creator of Doing to Done and former CEO of the David Allen Company, bridges the essential and the aspirational – the maintenance actions that keep life running and the bigger picture outcomes that make it meaningful.
This session reinforces the 2026 Learn OmniFocus theme of Sustainability in Practice by showing how consistent engagement with all your roles creates a truly sustainable way of living and working, one that honours both the necessary and the transformational. This session addresses the core sustainability challenge of how to create space for our most important roles to be fully expressed while managing the necessary actions that support the routine aspects of daily life.
Your Life Map
Starting with the Life Map, we journey through Current Reality to Chapters, demonstrating how to work with a 20-year timeframe that invites you to step into the bigger picture of your life. You’ll discover the benefits of defining and clarifying roles and how chapters, with their natural beginnings and endings, create opportunities for renewal and blank slates.
You can create your own life map based on a Google Sheet Template or a PDF.
Managing your 20-Year Vision with OmniFocus and Note-Taking Apps
Through the Doing to Done framework, we explore how OmniFocus can be used to help manage both day-to-day activities and actions that contribute to the realization of long-term visions.
The session also showcases the role of note-taking apps in developing ideas and for project support, and how to create seamless integration between OmniFocus and your note-taking apps of choice. Principles that can be applied with virtually any note-taking app were demonstrated with Apple Notes, Craft, and Notion. Our in-depth Using OmniFocus 4 with Note-Taking Apps course builds on the principles and techniques shown in this session.
The Clarity Collection
Mike introduced us to the Clarity Collection in Using OmniFocus with Analog Tools, Featuring Mike Williams. In this session, he gave us a sneak peek at the new Clarity Collection cards, specifically designed for children and retirees.
About Mike Williams
Through his leadership roles with General Electric, The David Allen Company, and Zappos, Mike kept noticing that people were desperate for a better path to productivity to help them fight digital distractions, mind clutter, and wasteful uses of their time. But the only resources available involved complex approaches, reading thick self-help books, or participating in boring seminars.
He knew a better way existed – one rooted in simplicity and realism. In his pursuit, he spent two decades working with thousands of people across different industries – from rocket scientists to business leaders to students to nonprofit organizations.
Today, Mike assists clients using an effective coaching methodology that’s far from complicated. He also used what works to create Doing to Done—Productivity Made Simple, Illustrated for Busy People Like Us, a visually engaging book about quick wins with significant impacts. Bringing a bit of Southern California energy to his work, he firmly believes that managing stress through better productivity shouldn’t be so stressful.
His interactive offerings include the Clarity Collection Community, a coaching program to “Turn Overwhelm into Clarity”, and the Productivity Masterclass Workshop.