Dawn, Noon, and Dusk Actions

Introduction

After reading Creating Flow with OmniFocus by Kourosh Dini M.D., I greatly improved my flow and focus of daily actions. I had been performing these actions on a daily basis but ended up recalling actions from memory and sometimes skipping and forgetting actions which would inevitably pile up as additional work on the weekends. I’ve worked out a system that keeps these daily tasks out of my head and into my trusted system (i.e. OmniFocus) so that I maintain the consistency that I desire AND keep my thoughts clear for more important ideas. The following is a breakdown of my dawn, noon, and dusk actions that I perform on a daily basis.

The following assumes you read Getting Things Done by David Allen and use OmniFocus for the Mac.

Project Overview

To start, it helps to have an overview of my projects via the planning mode of OmniFocus. In my case, I put all daily and weekly tasks in a “Reviews” folder because in a sense, these are my daily and weekly reviews before I start or return to work.

Each project is described as follows:

• Dawn - Repeats daily 5am - 8am, actions are sequential, and marked complete when the last action is performed.
• Noon - Repeats daily 11:30am - 1pm, actions are sequential, and marked complete when the last action is performed.
• Dusk - Repeats daily 5pm - 8pm, actions are sequential, and marked complete when the last action is performed.
• Weekly - Outside the scope of this article.
• Maintenance - A place for saving actions related to fixing and/or enhancing the above mentioned projects.

Dawn Actions

My actions for starting the day:

(click to view)

For those unfamiliar with OmniFocus, there are three columns to the screenshot above. The left-most column is for the actions themselves, the next column is for the context in which the action is to be performed, and the very last column is for the note icons (which have been expanded for reading).

I won’t go into each action individually since I think you can get a pretty good understanding of what each action does (via the associated notes) but I do want to go over the purpose of each group of actions:

• Catch Up - Each action is performed in sequence and is mainly for quickly catching up on activities that took place while I was away. For tweets and feeds that require further reading, I send them to Instapaper or (mark them as starred - in the case of Google Reader). These actions are reserved for quickly catching up on the news. In depth processing of the news happens later as you’ll see below.
• Plan - Here is where I plan (or modify previous plans) for the day based on news read and actions required of me after processing email. For calendaring, I use Google Calendar. I usually only need to check one calendar since all my other calendars pour into my personal calendar (via sharing). Important, next, and due soon actions are easily viewed and acted upon via the OmniFocus perspective links. Screenshots of each perspective are provided below.
• Clean Up - Based on what was read and planned for the day, here is where I go back and read up on the articles I didn’t have time for when catching up earlier. This section of actions is always “as time allows”. Some days I have more time, other days I don’t have time at all. I at least attempt to “touch the keys” even when time is limited. Notice that I don’t close my email client until the very end of this action group. This allows me to delegate or require actions of others while reviewing important, next, and due soon actions.
• Synchronize - Most days I have the ability to work from home…but if I do need to run out the door at least I’ll have my iPhone synced with my most critical data (well, ok, “critical” really only means OmniFocus but the other data is nice to have too).

Noon Actions

My actions when resurfacing from work:

(click to view)

Basically identical to my dawn actions except that, by this time, I might have SMS and voice mail messages to respond too (as I generally don’t respond any incoming messages while working). Remember, it’s all about protecting the flow and staying focused on the work at hand which means not getting detracted by email, phone, Twitter, Feeds, etc. This is something that got ingrained in my head after reading 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. The necessity to sync my phone is not really required, so that is not listed here either.

Dusk Actions

My actions when resurfacing from work and winding down the day:

(click to view)

These are the same actions as performed during the noon hour.

Perspectives

As promised, here are my OmniFocus perspective settings.

Important Actions

Next Actions

Due Soon Actions

Conclusion

In practice, I’ve found that it takes me anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour to complete the dawn, noon, and dusk projects. It used to be that these actions could pile up and get unwieldy. I’d have to claim information bankruptcy but now, with a trusted system, I can stay on task without ever letting the mountain overwhelm me. The key to all of this, of course, is being disciplined about it. When you are, the flow is smooth as silk but, let it get out of control, and it can become daunting.

These tasks, like anything else in OmniFocus, are constantly evolving. It might be that I streamline this even further in the future. For me, at least, it works and maybe it can help you too.

1 Comment to Dawn, Noon, and Dusk Actions

1. 

   Post Update: I’ve updated the original post with error corrections to my contexts and also dropped the use of the Today perspective as I find that my Important perspective handles all my hot/immediate/important actions for the day. All-in-all, things are more streamlined now.
Brooke Kuhlmann on March 25th, 2011

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