Flow 2 – dealing with time-sensitive input

Sometimes there will be something that happens on a specific date. In our example our Appraisal 2020 project requires us to kick start a process off once the appraisal window opens on Sunday night.

This actually illustrates an important concept wrt GTD – the time I identify a task is completely de-coupled from the time it’s appropriate to do it.

Deferring to not start before a certain date

In our example there is no point starting before a certain date, so I assign a start date of the Monday following the window opening. This is an example of the “Defer” part of the workflow.

Look at OmniFocus, we can see a “Defer” field.

Putting the word “Monday” into the defer field automatically sets it to next week. We can see at a a glance in OmniFocus that there is no point in starting this task before April 20, 2020.

Next let’s look at the opposite flow, when we can start something ay any time but not finish after a certain date/time.

Setting a task to be due completed on or before a certain date

At the other end of the spectrum are tasks that have a completion date – we can think of it like the expiry date on a jar of food. We can start anytime, but it must not finish after a certain date.

One thing to note, is that I rarely assign due dates to tasks that form my planned work for the sprint – they’re implicit from the sprint commitment itself.

But let’s continue with our appraisal example. In this instance we also have to come up with our own ideas about our objectives for the year. Our boss has said they’d like it no later than Wednesday. So on the one hand, we can’t submit the draft paperwork before Monday, but we can’t get our objectives in later than close of business on Wednesday.

In this instance, we use the “Due Date” field of OmniFocus.

And we can see that in contrast to “Complete Draft Paperwork”, we have a Due Date for “Come up with ideas for objectives”. The different columns showing us due and defer dates, and that gives us a snapshot view of timings when we take a look at our project commitments.

When you have a precise date and time

What when something has to happen exactly at a certain time and place, or on a given day? After all there’s no use my turning up to a dentist appointment one hour early or one hour late. This is where the calendar fits into GTD, and into our tooling.

It’s a little more involved than the previous examples, I’ll go into that next.

One thought on “A GTD Sprint example using OmniFocus and Freemind”
  1. […] paper is fine), you need a way of storing both your workflow and support materials. At work I use OmniFocus and Freemind but there are a heap of tools that you could use. Do you have a favoured set of tools? Mention it […]

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