Staying On Top of Teaching Responsibilities with OmniFocus Perspectives (OmniFocus Mini-Series)

Teaching is a challenging, multifaceted career. I never end a day feeling like I accomplished everything I was supposed to. But sometimes, software can help! And for my tasks, that software is OmniFocus. 

Most of the checkable todo items in my life go in OmniFocus. It is a powerful task app for Mac, iOS, and Apple Watch that is based on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. There are 100 reasons I love it. Lately, it’s because I am getting a lot of mileage out of the Perspective feature. Perspectives allow you to build different custom views for how OmniFocus displays your tasks.

The Forecast Perspective comes installed on OmniFocus. It shows you a convenient day at a glance so that you never need to stress about todos until the day they are due.

A Perspective is kind of like a custom search that you can save. The building blocks will seem similar if you have ever made an email rule.

I have over 1,000 tasks in OmniFocus. My goal with Perspectives is to create windows into my work that empower me to think only about the things that are relevant to me at a given time or in a given situation. 

Here are a few Perspectives that are most useful to me. 

Priority

The Priority Perspective filters only items that are due soon or that are high priority items I want to be working on for the day. OmniFocus highlights flagged tasks with an orange ring and due tasks with a yellow ring to draw your attention.

This Perspective shows me all of my most important tasks. I designed it for moments where I have an overwhelming number of things to do spanning numerous unrelated projects and I just need to focus on the things I can’t survive the day (or moment) without doing. This Perspective is set up to show only tasks that are due soon, overdue, and tasks that are both tagged ‘Today’ and have a flag. The result is a list of tasks that are due soon mixed in with the most important things I want to be working on ‘today.’ 

This is how my Priority Perspective is set up.

There are usually only a few tasks that result from this search which helps my eyes (and brain) focus on top priorities.

Today

This is a project that filters only items with the tag ‘Today.’ These items already show up on my Forecast view alongside overdue and due soon items, but there are times where I do not have any items due that day, or where I they aren’t available yet, resulting in a cluttered looking Forecast. The Today Perspective shows me only a list of things I want to be working on Today, organized by project.

This is my Today Perspective. It is similar to the Forecast, only tasks don’t necessarily need to be due to show up here, and it is organized by project. See an image of my Forecast at the top of this post.

This is how my Today Perspective is set up.

Deferred

This Perspective shows me when certain items became available to begin working on, in the order that they became available. This is useful for seeing if there are tasks that became available a long time ago that I am really slacking on, or maybe that I need to drop and admit I took on too much. 

My Deferred Perspective. Tip - Giving an item a Defer date in OmniFocus means that it isn’t available to work on until that date. You can use these to easily filter only items that are ‘available,’ which can relieve the stress of seeing everything at once.

Teaching

I have numerous projects relating to teaching in the Howard County Public School System. I have action lists for each of my ensembles, for directing the HCPSS Honor Band, for planning concerts, field trips, and for articulating our students from middle to high school. The Teaching Perspective focuses me on only the tasks related to teaching responsibilities, and organizes them by due date. This way I am thinking about only work tasks, while remaining focused on the next task I should be completing.

My Teaching Perspective shows only Howard County Public School System responsibilities. This is really useful for when I need to focus only on work.

Grading

My school uses Canvas for grading students and Synergy for tracking certain data on them. Both are slow, web-based, programs that take a while to load. For this reason, I tend to want to spend concentrated times working with grades and then ignore them, rather than being constantly in and out of the grade book.

For this reason, I add a lot of grade based tasks to OmniFocus and tag them with keywords like Grades, Canvas, or Synergy. I tend to use these a lot when triaging email. For example, if my school’s data clerk emails teachers with due dates and deadlines for final grades, I forward that into my OmniFocus inbox using my special email address that the app provides. Once it is out of my email inbox and into my OmniFocus inbox I give it a defer date and a due date, and tag it with the tag ‘Canvas.’

Sometimes students email me work if they have issues submitting it on Canvas. Or parents ask me questions in email about certain grades. In these situations, I forward the emails into my OmniFocus inbox and then tag them with the necessary tag. 

The Grades Perspective aggregates all of these tags into one view. This is useful because these tasks rarely have hard due dates. By not assigning them due dates, they never clutter up my Forecast perspective (where I spend most of my time). When I am ready to focus on grading, I can open up this Perspective and filter all other tasks out.

The Grades Perspective shows only responsibilities that involve entering grades and working with my school’s learning management software.

Top 3

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that I just need to think “what are three things that I need to focus on today.” This usually happens on days where I need to be spending long periods of serious focus on one or more broad tasks. I often go traditional-task-list and break out a pencil and paper for moments like this. Lately, I use this OmniFocus Perspective called Top 3. I have a tag called “1,” “2,” and “3.” All this Perspective does is filter them so that I don’t see anything else.

Icons

OmniFocus Perspectives can be given a custom icon that matches the style of the perspective icons that come with the app. I am able to make my Perspectives look really attractive and eye-grabbing with the MacStories Perspective Icons, a new product that features 20,000 icons for OmniFocus. You can read more about them and buy them here. 

Conclusion

OmniFocus has challenged me to think about my own productivity and capacity to focus. Through Perspectives, I am able to build windows into my work that help me to see only what I need to at a given time. 

You can read more about OmniFocus here and learn more about building Perspectives from learnomnifocus.com here.

Brainstorming ways teachers might be more productive with Microsoft’s New Fluid Framework

Microsoft kicked off a developer conference earlier this week. The Verge writes about a very cool set of forthcoming productivity features.

Microsoft’s new Fluid Office document is Google Docs on steroids - The Verge

Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web. The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents.

Microsoft calls its Lego blocks Fluid components, and they can be edited in real time by anyone in any app. The idea is that you could create things like a table without having to switch to multiple apps to get it done, and the table will persist on the web like a Lego block, free for anyone to use and edit.

This is obviously very cool, but it’s the next part that gets me excited.

Fluid is designed to make those tables, charts, and lists always feel alive and editable, no matter where you create them and regardless of how you share and copy them into other apps. Instead of getting a static and dull chart you copied from Excel, you’ll get a chart that can be edited anywhere you paste it, and you’ll see everyone making edits as they happen. That might be in the middle of an email chain, in a chat app like Microsoft Teams, or even third-party apps eventually.

So certain parts of Office documents can be shared between multiple spaces, or with multiple users, across multiple apps. If I am understanding this correctly, I can instantly think of 25 ways this could make my job easier. Here are a few...

1. Copy tasks from a Microsoft To Do project called Field Trip into an email to my music team and have everyone check off tasks in the email as they do them. Status of those completed tasks syncs back to my project in To Do.
2. Say I am logging a spreadsheet of student concert attire orders and I need some data for a few choir kids. I can copy and paste just those cells, email them to the choir teacher, he can fill out the data right in the email, and I watch as it syncs back to my spreadsheet.
3. Similar to that last one. My school district sends me an updated list of recommended private teachers. I email just the flute teachers to my flute students and it stays up to date when the data is edited by those who maintain the list.
4. No more putting the same student names in multiple different documents. I can have one Word document that acts as a primary roster. All concert programs, student lists, sectional roster documents, etc. are just snippets of text from my primary roster document, that automatically update when I update the primary roster. No more misspelled names, inconsistency, or duplicated work.
5. Various data from documents can be clipped into media rich notes in OneNote where I can access them alongside one another without thinking about document management. For example, a short list of Concert Attire tasks could coexist in the same note as a portion of a payment spreadsheet, and both could update in real time when I edit their respective documents in To Do and Excel.

For the reccord, I don't use any of Microsoft's apps as my default tools, but I can certainly see myself using them more often if I can leverage this kind of power out of them.

Some questions I have:

• Will this be web only or will it eventually roll out to Microsoft apps on all platforms?
• Will Microsoft stand alone apps like Excel continue to exist or will they be replaced with one app (like the iPhone which now has an "Office" app that combines features of the whole suite)
• Will this actually catch on with people who are used to saving files to places on their hard drive? It seems ahead of its time.
• Will it compete with Google Docs? Someone needs to. Google Docs gets a only a few things right, but they get them really right, and that's why I think it has been so pervasive. Personally, I would far prefer that my work and personal circles relied on great native apps like Office.
• Will third party apps be able to embed the modular Microsoft elements inside of them, create modular elements to be able to insert in Microsoft docs, or both?
• Would Apple ever consider participating in this framework with their iWorks apps? Would they recreate their own version?