Course requirements, philosophy, and goals

Welcome to the course! 

Before we get started, let's go over the course goals, the course requirements, and the course philosophy.

Go ahead and watch the video.

To summarize:
  • The goal of the course is to teach you a simple system you can trust to get more done and to be in control of your projects.
  • You need OmniFocus on the Mac and/or OmniFocus on the iPad.
  • You also need to be willing to invest some time and effort.
  • Our approach will be to get you going with a simple system that will help you get stuff done right away. Then, over time, you'll tweak the system to meet your unique needs.

Note: You will need the Pro version of OmniFocus.

If you have not yet purchased OmniFocus, that's okay; you can get a 14-day free trial from OmniFocus.com or from the Mac App Store. That should be plenty of time for you to take the course lessons.

Right now, if you haven't already set up OmniSync, please do so before moving on to the next lesson. You can follow these instructions:

Syncing OmniFocus using Omni Sync Server

After you've done that, let's get going.

Lesson transcript:
[00:00:00] Hi and welcome. My name is Peter, and I'm really glad that you're here. Let me talk—before we get started with the course—about the course goals, the course requirements and the course philosophy, so that you know what to expect. 

[00:00:14] And let's start with, of course, goals. After all, if you don't know what your goal is, how can you measure progress? So the main goal for this course is to have you feeling in control of your projects, to have you getting stuff done, to have you being able to focus and to make sure that you don't feel overwhelmed by all the things that you have to do. And of course, we're going to do this using OmniFocus. 

[00:00:34] Now, to be a little bit more specific, there's kind of three phases to this. First, we're gonna help you figure out which tasks are available for you to work on, out of all of the projects going on in your life. After we know which tasks are available for you to work on, we're going to make sure that you can pick one to work on and then we're going to make sure that you can actually focus on that task. That's the goal of this course. 

[00:00:57] Second of all, the course requirements. Now, the main requirement of this course is that you have OmniFocus installed either on the Mac or on the iPad. So I will be showing you how to set OmniFocus up and how to use it on the Mac. But you can translate all of this to the iPad if your iPad is your main OmniFocus device—no problem. Secondly, I will require some time and effort from you because change doesn't happen unless you do things. So it's not enough just to watch all the videos. You also have to implement what we talk about. Now actually going through the course main only take you an afternoon or two. But of course what you want to do is build habits that will help you become more productive over time. So in this course, I'll be teaching you a simple system that you can trust. I'll be showing you how to set that up and you'll be setting it up along with me. And you can then use that system as a starting point that you will improve on over time. 

[00:01:53] And so that brings me to the course philosophy. The philosophy of this course is to start small. I'll be teaching you a simple system, not a very complex system. I'm not going to start with all the advanced automation that you can do in OmniFocus, because if I overwhelm you with those things, you may end up not doing much at all. So we're going to start with the basics. A simple system you can trust that works, that will have you working more productively. You're going to use that for a while, and then after you use that for a while, you're going to notice what works well, what could be improved a little bit, and then you're going to make some small tweaks and you're going to do that consistently over time to end up evolving your own OmniFocus setup and workflow that meets your unique needs. So that's the course philosophy. I'm going to give you a starting point—a really solid starting point—and you're going to improve it over time. That's the best way to actually make a big change in your productivity. 

[00:02:46] So with all that said, let's dive right in and move on to the next lesson.