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Establishing a Daily OmniFocus Routine

Doing a short review at the beginning and end of each day helps you make good use of your time as you go through the day.

In this article, we’ll look at one strategy for using OmniFocus throughout the day. This approach makes extensive use of OmniFocus’ defer feature to control when each action, group and project becomes available.

Start of Day Routine

View All Available Actions

Start the day by looking at a list of all of your available actions. If you’d like to see these actions grouped by Context, click on the Contexts tab and set the View setting to Available.

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Similarly, if you prefer to view available actions grouped by project, click on the Projects tab and set the View setting to Available. Make sure that nothing is selected in the sidebar to ensure that you see a complete list. You can clear selected sidebar items by clicking the blank area under the list of folders and projects in the sidebar.

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If you’re using the Pro edition of OmniFocus you can easily create an Available perspective that makes accessing available actions even more convenient. See the Custom Perspectives with OmniFocus for Mac (Pro) video for more information.

Defer Actions to Future Date

Next, go through all available actions one by one. If an action can’t be completed today, or very likely won’t be completed due to other commitments, defer it to a date in the future. It will appear on your available list once that date arrives.

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