Urgent vs Important (revisited)

[Simon Dodds]

Hi all,

It occurred to me recently that there are so many Omnifocus users out there that have blogged about their setups - and since both OF and MLO are practically identical in functionality (although MLO is much better at setting up task views/"perspectives"!) it makes sense to look there to see what we can apply to MLO.

I stumbled across this great article - http://colterreed.com/tracking-urgent-and-important-tasks-in-omnifocus/ - where the Eisenhower matrix is presented in such a clever way that I had to share it here.

The logic is so simple: 

• important = star
• urgent = due in next X days
  

So here's the MLO setup I use to make this all work:

• Show available actions, include closed contexts
• Hide actions belonging to closed or suspended projects, and those with incomplete dependencies & subtasks
• Show all tasks that are starred OR due in the next X days (i use 7)
• Sort by Starred, then Due, then Start

It has since become THE default view for me on MLO  - try it out.

-Simon

[Lisa Stroyan]

Very cool idea, and I like that you can easily reconfigure how urgent of a view you want, though I'm not sure I can give up the ease of making urgent tasks with a star....wondering what to do on a mobile platform to change dates quickly also.

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[Stef]

Apparently, I'm not the only one struggling with this.

Strange that we are looking for shortcuts for something that is built into MLO (we have Urgent/Important for every task,project & goal).

The problem is that it's:

   - too complex

   - not visual, I loose overview of all the settings that interact with each other

   - as a consequence, the resulting sorting is in general not the intended one

So now I ended up with a flag (one for every quadrant), which is not portable to iPad/iPhone.

So thanks for this suggestion.

[MLO User]

This may be helpful.  Urgent/important quadrants can be determined by creating four views, although I use three, with different rules for Urgency and Importance.  The Q1 view has two rules: Urgency >= 100 and Importance >= 100.  Q2 has Urgency < 100 and Importance >= 100.  I lump Q3 and Q4 together and use one rule Importance < 100.  In this way the quadrants are determined by where the Urgency and Importance sliders are set.  Unfortunately this method is also not usable on my phone.

[Simon Dodds]

The ability to display this view on the iOS app is what did it for me. On the desktop version I have also added some automatic formatting to more clearly differentiate the quadrants within this view using different icons.

It is true that urgency and importance are in the app, but as some of you said, it's functionality can be a little cumbersome.

What also won me over in this approach was the simple statement that if it is urgent, then it would be due soon, right? Given that, the urgency field becomes redundant.

[Richard C]

Haven't had time to get my head round this but haven't had a quick look at the article and what Omnifocus does,  I have to say that I really like the 'Forecast' concept that Omnifocus is looking to implement.    This is essentially what I want from the 'calendar' functionality that we have talked about at great length.   ie: something that looks a few days ahead and allows you to see/plan/manage up coming commitments, deadlines. etc.

The problem with the term 'Calendar' is that it means so many different things to different people.   Perhaps from now on I will use the the term 'forecast' to describe what I am looking for.

Richard  

[Nick Clark]

Isn't this what the Due Next 7/30 Days views are for? It's how I use them.

Nick