An Alternative to “Waiting For” in GTD

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is a brilliant and life-changing methodology for productivity, but one idea in the original book doesn’t make sense to me: the context “waiting for”.

At the heart of GTD is the method of always defining the next action on a project, in order to keep things moving. One context of actions suggested by Allen is called “waiting for”. This context is used to categorise those times when you are waiting for somebody else to do something. For example, an action called “hear back from John about project proposal” might be categorised as a “waiting for” kind of action.

The problem is: “waiting for” is not an action. You can’t do waiting. It’s a kind of inaction. This means that it doesn’t really fit with the whole GTD method of defining action contexts by what you do.

I suggest the alternative is to create a “follow up with” action that you schedule for some time in the future. If you are waiting for John to get back to you about a project proposal, create a deferred task called “follow up with John about proposal” (context could be email or phone). When the task shows up, if you’ve already heard back from John then you can just delete the task. Otherwise, you have the correct next action for yourself.

This alternative seems more in line with the underlying philosophy of GTD to view all your projects in terms of your own responsibilities and next actions.

How To Check If Your OmniFocus Projects Have An Evernote Page Automatically Using Keyboard Maestro

Large projects usually have both a series of tasks associated with them and some kind of documentation. I use different applications to work with these two different kinds of project information because each application is designed specifically for one thing and is the best tool for that job. OmniFocus is great for task management but not designed for documentation. Evernote is great for documentation but not as good at handling tasks as a dedicated task management app like OmniFocus. 

Using two applications to handle project information creates a problem though. How do I tell if I have documentation for all my projects in OmniFocus? Or, how can I tell if I have an OmniFocus project for all my Evernote project pages. I have to compare the list of projects in OmniFocus and the list in Evernote to see what is missing.

MIT has a very nice webpage for comparing lists here. Using this webpage, the workflow is as follows:

1. Select all live projects in OmniFocus and export the list to the MIT webpage

2. Select all live projects in Evernote and export the list to the MIT webpage

3. Compare the lists and see what is missing from either list.

That sounds simple, but is quite time consuming and requires a lot of individual steps. For this reason, I wrote a macro in Keyboard Maestro to do it all automatically. In case you are interested, each step is outlined below:

Digitize Everything

We live in a period when many physical objects are being replaced by software and digital data. Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur and founder of the X-Prize, summarised the process in his book, Abundance:

Just think of all the consumer goods and services that are now available with the average smart phone: cameras, radios, televisions, web browsers, recording studios, editing suites, movie theaters, GPS navigators, word processors, spreadsheets, stereos, flashlights, board games, card games, video games, a whole range of medical devices, maps, atlases, encyclopedias, dictionaries, translators, textbooks, world class educations, and the ever-growing smorgasbord known as the app store.

Cumbersome objects like these used to clutter up our homes. Now you don’t need to own any of those things. You can replace them with apps on your smartphone, and data in the cloud.

My approach to decluttering has been to jump on this dematerialization trend and push it as far as I can with my own possessions. Technology has made it possible to get rid of the majority of my physical possessions, whilst losing none of the benefits of owning them.

One of the major reasons I kept possessions was because they had meaning for me. Meaning is ultimately information. And information can be stored digitally, requiring no space in my luggage. My old paper journals were important to me because of the ideas I had written down in them, not because of the paper that those words were written on. By scanning my journals, I captured the information in them, moved that digital data into the cloud, and shredded the original notebooks.

This is a key strategy I used for extreme decluttering: I identified the meaning I attached to each possession, worked out how to digitize it, and then moved that information into the cloud. I scanned all my old photo albums. I digitised all my music and movies. I replaced all my paper books with a digital library. I got rid of the physical possessions but kept all my valuable data.

You can declutter to a far more radical extent if you replace your physical possessions with software and data. By digitizing as much as I could, I made many of my physical possessions redundant. It’s no sacrifice to get rid of redundant objects. In fact, it is a relief.

Replacing physical things with software has increased my quality of life. Dematerialization is a process that everyone is gradually adopting anyway, whether they are aware of it or not. I am just doing it more consistently. I recommend that you embrace the trend.

How to Manage Your Commitments as Projects

This diagram shows how to manage all your personal, work, and other commitments as projects within a productivity system based around the idea of Getting Things Done (GTD). When something arises that might involve some kind of commitment, the first step is to capture the idea immediately as a project within your system. Decide whether this new project is something that you are committed to working on right now, or if you are just considering it’s potential.

Someday Maybe Projects

If you are not yet sure whether to commit to a new idea, make it a Someday Maybe Project. Someday Maybe Projects can change into Live Projects, if you decide to commit to them. Otherwise, if you decide later that it is not worth doing after all, drop it instead.

Live Projects

If you are committed to a new idea as soon as it arises, start working on it as a Live Project, skipping the Someday Maybe stage. If all goes well, work on the project until it becomes a Completed Project. If at any point the project becomes no longer relevant, drop it.

Managing Projects With Tags in Evernote

I find it helpful to document my projects within Evernote. I create a separate Note for each project and use a tag to denote the current status. As a project goes through its lifecycle, I keep editing the same note with accumulated information on it. I change the tag on a project as it’s status changes.  I have tags for Someday Maybe, Live Project, Complete Project, and Dropped Project.

As part of my weekly review, I use Evernote to check through my list of Live projects and Someday Maybe projects. I use a saved searches (“Shortcuts” in the Evernote menu) based on the project tag to generate  these lists automatically.

Complete and Dropped Projects

Sometimes it is helpful to be able to see notes from past projects, so I have tags for Complete Project and Dropped Project. These notes don’t get in the way of my current work, because they have a different tag.

Further Information On Working With Someday Maybe Projects

You can find more information about working with Someday Maybe projects in episode 257 of my podcast:

The Missing Link Between Evernote and OmniFocus: A Workaround

OmniFocus and Evernote are two vital components of my project planning system on MacOS and iOS. I organise all my active commitments into projects in OmniFocus, where I manage my tasks. I make a project note for each of these projects in Evernote, where I store all the text, diagrams, and other reference material related to the project.

The Missing Link

There is a catch with this system though. These apps don’t integrate with each other as well as you might hope. As I work, I want to switch back-and-forth between my tasks in OmniFocus and my documentation in Evernote. This is where the problem arises.

Linking in one direction—from OmniFocus to Evernote—is easy. You right-click on a note in Evernote, press the alt key, and select "Copy Classic Note Link" (there are many webpages out there explaining how to do this). That gives you a nice hyperlink to the note in Evernote, which you can then paste into the notes field of an OmniFocus project or task.

The missing link is back the other way, from Evernote to OmniFocus. In the past, you could select a project in OmniFocus and  “copy as link”. You could then simply paste this link into Evernote. This is still the method currently recommended on the Inside OmniFocus page. But at some point, Evernote made it impossible to paste a link for anything that wasn’t a HTTP address. Now when you paste an OmniFocus link, you just get plain text saying something like “omnifocus:///task/icDN-FlhkDLK”. Not very helpful.

A Workaround

Here is a workaround for making a link from Evernote to OmniFocus:

1. Right click (or control click) on your project in OmniFocus and select “copy as link”:

2. Paste the text into the relevant note in Evernote. It will come out as plain text, and should start with “omnifocus:///task/”

3. When you want to go from Evernote back to Omnifocus, right click on the “omnifocus:///task/” text in Evernote and select Service- “Open URL”:

That will bring OmniFocus to the front and will land you on the correct project inside OmniFocus.

That’s it. It is not quite as fast as a simple click, but better than having to search inside OmniFocus each time. I recommend you always put your OmniFocus link in the same place on your Evernote project notes, so that you know where to find the link quickly. I put my links in the first line of the note.

Project Planning on macOS and iOS

This is my project planning system on macOS and iOS. I use these apps to plan projects within the context of a personal productivity system based around the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach. When planning a project, I use these tools in the following sequence:

1. Task Management System

Project planning starts with a task management system. On macOS and iOS, the best app I’ve found for this purpose is OmniFocus. This is where I create a project and manage tasks for the project, including the project startup tasks.

I’ve spoken more about task management in Episode 191 of The Voluntary Life:

2. Project Documentation

As I start working on a project, I generate notes and graphics which need a home. The second tool in my planning system is my project documentation. I use Evernote on macOS and iOS for project documentation.

I explain my use of Evernote for reference material in Episode 120 of The Voluntary Life Podcast:

3. Mindmap

Once I have a project page in place, I begin to get into the detail of planning the project. The app that I find most helpful in organising my thoughts is a mind map. I do a brain dump and get everything out of my head into a mind map in a fairly unstructured way. As the mind map grows, I order and rearrange ideas on it, categorising different aspects of the project that I need to work on and issues that I need to resolve.

Episode 186 of my podcast has more detail on how I use mind maps in project planning:

4. Process Map

A process map is like a more rigorous and evolved version of the mind map. Whereas a mind map just has everything branching off from a single topic with no further structure, a process chart adds in the sequencing and logic of a project. I use InShort to create my process maps. For more detail about process maps see TVL Episode 205:

5. Gantt Chart

Once I have created a process chart, I can add in task durations and start times and create a Gantt chart within InShort. I find this process a bit tricky in InShort, but I haven’t yet found a good alternative app for it.

A Note On Project Planning Versus Project Management

This workflow is great for a single user doing project planning, but I use different tools for collaborative project management work. That will be a subject for a future post.