Prioritization is often even more difficult and daunting as the tasks that confront you. A priority filter in your Personal Kanban helps you determine what tasks are ready in your queue, and the order of importance they should assume. Click on the video below for a quick priority filter tutorial.
Note: This video is best viewed full screen.
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Hi there and thanks for the presentation. Definitely something to think about.
I use Omnifocus for backlogs and roughly what I want to accomplish today. When the day starts I write the actions i expect to get done on a pomodoro todo sheet and estimate.
I like the idea of WIP, but haven’t found a way to integrate that into my OmniFocus setup.
Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?
Great question!
I have a working session with someone who is a heavy Omnifocus user on Monday, I will bring this up and see what we come up with.
Thanks, interested in hearing more.
I’ve just emailed the OmniGroup and asked them if OmniFocus has an API that would allow my to construct my own view. Something like this : http://bit.ly/d2r5U3
I’ll comment here when I get a reply.
-A
I use OmniFocus pretty heavily, and until Personal Kanban, I was a heavy GTD believer. I still like and use a lot of what’s in GTD, but OmniFocus no longer gives me what I want.
I haven’t found any way to either enforce WIP (or even show WIP) or to model lanes in OmniFocus.
At this point I’m using it as fairly decent backlog management tool. I do subscribe to trying to get everything OUT of my head. So OmniFocus is a good place to dump and process it. Then once a week I pour as much as I want (and as will fit) from OmniFocus to AgileZen. Then I wish I had an iPhone app.
FYI
OmniFocus does not have an API, but I managed to hack something together using the OmniFocus applescript dictionary and Appscript. http://flic.kr/p/7HffMq
My definitions : backlog = uncompleted tasks with no due date or due date in the future | WIP = uncompleted tasks with due date <= today.
Sorry about being off topic here. I realize this has little todo with the priority filter
-A
I just had a thought, if you stop using contexts the way GTD wants you to, then you can use them as lanes. I just replaced all my GTD contexts with these 5 :
Lo (8)
Medium (6)
Hi (4)
Doing (2)
Holding (15)
Obviously, omnifocus won’t keep track of WIP limits, but I can do that manually. The win, at least in theory, is that I get omnifocus keeping track of my backlog (in the project view), and I have personal kanban built on top of it (in the context view). The backlog is anything that does not have a context.
Oh, and there’s no “done” column, there doesn’t need to be, just check it off when it’s done.
I just made this change today, so we’ll see how it goes.
So, a couple months later here’s what I have to report.
It’s great. Omnifocus is a great project planning tool with excellent cross machine syncing, so that I can do stuff on my laptop and sync it to my phone transparently.
If you already have Omnifocus and like it, but want to try Personal Kanban, I say go for it!
In the last couple weeks, however, I have stopped using Omnifocus in favor of iKan for the iPhone. iKan is a tool that Gary Bernhardt, Jim Benson, Corey Ladas & I wrote. In the interest of eating our own dogfood, I’ve been using it instead of Omnifocus. There are good things and bad about iKan.
Good :
- it’s small and fast
- it knows about wip limits and does sensible color things about them
- it supports drag and drop
Bad :
- no desktop client like omnifocus
- no web client (though we do support import from agile zen)
We are planning on doing a release before too long to support integration with different web services. We are thinking about Remember the Milk or Lean Kit Kanban.
Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for sharing about your experiments.
So have you stopped using OmniFocus altogether? What’s your latest experience with iKan?