The first thing you will want to do is to create a Draft with the Taskpaper format. Setting such goals deserves a separate entry which I am planning to write.I have created an any action group for Drafts 5 which is meant to help you create Taskpaper formatted projects or tasks and then send it all along to OmniFocus afterwards. I have general goals on how to spend time which limit certain categories and define minimum time for other categories (mostly Planned and Writing but also Organizing). In a sense it is similar to “Planned” but requires even more concentration, special contexts and persistence. “ Writing” – This is of course of special importance to academics and deserves tracking.Work which comes from my own planning system “ Planned” – This is mostly Q2, sometimes Q1.These are things which need to be urgently done and were not planned ahead (i.e. “ Unplanned” – Covey would call it Q3, sometimes Q1.“ Calendar” (mostly meetings which take time on my calendar).“ Organizing”: processing (mostly reading and responding to emails) reviewing/planning travel.So my OfficeTime categories are inspired by this system but are slightly adjusted to reflect my own realities and priorities. For example, is answering email Q1, Q2 or Q3? I tried to use his system a while ago and it helped in some aspects, but I also had many questions unanswered. Covey argued that effective people and organizations should spend at least 25% of their time in Q2. It encouraged to separate all activities into 4 groups or “quadrants”: Q1 = urgent and important Q2 = important but not urgent Q3 = urgent but not important and Q4 = non-urgent and non-important. In fact, these questions were inspired by the “First Things First” book by Stephen Covey I read around 2004. So I asked myself a question: how much time do I spend in meetings? how much time do I spend answering email? how much time do I spend actually doing something I have planned to do in advance? how much time do I spend writing? This resulted from reflecting on how I spend my time, more specifically from frustration of being constantly disrupted or sitting in various meetings and not being able to do my work. At first I was not sure what to do with categories, but then I found a very helpful way to use them. OfficeTime also allows assigning a category to each entry. I can see where my time went in a specific week just by casting a glance at my cal All my administrative calendars are orange or red, teaching – green, and research – blue. Grouping simply means using similar colors. (I also have an area for “everything else”). responding to emails, planning, weekly reviews etc.).Īs a side remark which I cover in another entry, I also group my calendars into the same three areas: Teaching, Administration and Research. One of my projects is called “Organizing” and is designated for professional activities which do not fit into any of the projects (e.g. For example, my Teaching area contains MSc and PhD teaching as separate projects my Research area contains various research projects. OfficeTime allows you to insert “Separators” in its menus to see such project grouping. There are only 3-5 OfficeTime projects in each area, thus I only track 12 professional OfficeTime projects (as opposed to over 50 active and some 70 on hold projects in OmniFocus). Thus, my projects are categorized in these three areas. In my case, a major aim of tracking time by project is to assure a balance between teaching, administration and research: my three main responsibilities. In this case it makes sense to set up and track such a project in OfficeTime. Sometimes you would need to know how much time is spent on a specific “GTD” project, for example, for formal reporting processes. I have over 50 active GTD projects in OmniFocus and I find tracking time for all or even the majority of them impossible. a sequence of more than one action leading to an outcome). There is certain logic and temptation to make OfficeTime projects correspond to projects in the GTD sense (i.e. OfficeTime allows you to track time spent on various projects.
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