In my last post I described my current GTD setup using OmniFocus. This works really well, but doesn't always make it easy to keep the important and unimportant activities sorted out and enables confusion between activity and achievement. A couple things I find really useful for making sure I'm focusing on the important things are:

1. Identifying 3 major goals for each day. I try to focus on completing these before even reading e-mail or getting caught up in the emergencies of the day. This is a great way to focus on what is really important each day. I also love the idea of avoiding e-mail until some of the important things get done. There will always be more e-mail to read and answer. The trouble with e-mail is that when you reply, people just write back, leading to more e-mail and if you always feel the need to read and reply quickly you can easily get stuck in an endless cycle of communication that may or may not be leading to results on the most important things.
2. In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey describes 4 Quadrants for classifying your activities based on Urgency and Importance. The ideal scenario is to have activities focused in Quadrant II, that is those that are both urgent and important. By classifying the items on your activities list into 4 Quadrants , it becomes quite easy to focus on the most important things. In Omnifocus this functionality is lacking, but I use the Flag feature to identify Quadrant I activities that are both important and urgent. The Weekly review forces thinking each week into Quadrant II. By using the tip above of focusing on 3 strategic and important items each day it is fairly easy to ensure that the important activities are being address. This is of course true if one isn't over-committing. That will be a future topic.

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