Previously… I talk to you all the time about productivity but lately it’s been like I’ve been hit with a bag of spanners. A cold of unusual size definitely contributed but I admit I’ve also been just overwhelmed with juggling too many things.

This week is the attempt to put this all right and get back to work. I’m hoping that this will be of some use if you are off the productivity wagon or if you are yet to get to grips with all the plates you’re spinning. But it is also selfish: the fact that I’m telling you about this week in detail means I am doing this week in detail.

Admittedly, on Monday I was feeling sufficiently better that I thought this would be an easy ride to triumph. Instead, snuffles, coughs, loathsome and detestable incapacity was the order of the week.

But at last some progress.

Listen, clue number 1 to being off the productivity wagon is being afraid to look at your To Do list. My To Do list is OmniFocus which I love so much that I practically wear the teeshirt. (Actually, is there a teeshirt? Evernote has them, why not The Omni Group?)

Nonetheless, for weeks now I’ve been afraid of seeing what I wasn’t doing. I’ve continued working as best I could and I know I’ve been getting more done than I think, but I don’t know and I can’t know as long as I am avoiding OmniFocus.

I have said this and everyone who uses this superb software has said this and it is true: if you use OmniFocus, it helps you and you come away feeling lighter. One very specific thing you do to use is to open the bloody thing and see what tasks you’ve got in there.

But a second very specific thing is the Review.

OmniFocus is meant to be this thing that you quickly dip into to see what tasks you can do right now and then you do it. You are not meant to spend much time in the app itself. Except quite regularly, you need to spend a little time in it. This is the review: you look at every task in every project you’re juggling and you make decisions. Add tasks, delete ones that don’t matter any more, all that.

The trouble is that if you have a lot of projects, you open up OmniFocus and it’s saying, it’s throbbing that you have 76 things to review. In detail. It’s just too many.

What you can do is look at your shopping list project, for instance, and say okay, I accept that I have to review it but make me review it once a year at most. Then I have a particular book project on that, frankly, I need to be on top of all the time so I should get OmniFocus to remind me to review that every day.

That’s what I spent all of Wednesday doing.

All of it.

Don’t take this as a criticism of OmniFocus, take it as a criticism of me and of how bad I’ve left everything slide. Yesterday I spent 5 hours and 9 minutes reviewing everything.

EVERYTHING.

And do you know what? I feel so much better. There are still big worries, big delays, but right now, this minute, I feel I know what the worries are and I know exactly what the delays are. I even know how I will solve some of them. And that feels pretty good. If I weren’t still coughing like a banshee, I would be feeling spectacular.

That’s the thing to take away from OmniFocus, it’s the thing to take away from the day and the entire week: look at your list and it helps. Just looking is good, getting a grip on everything. If I hadn’t actually done anything today, I’d still feel good because understanding your situation is better than cowering away from it.

But I did do things.

I said I’d been carrying on working despite hiding from OmniFocus. As I went through 76 projects and an apparent total of 3,010 tasks waiting for me to do, I found I had already done 139 tasks. You know how good it feels ticking one thing off as done? Imagine ticking 139.

And now imagine ticking a further 29 as you go through the review. If I came to a task I could actually do now, I did it now.

True, I did add 15 new tasks. But I also deleted 81 that I either won’t do or do’t need to.

And I scrapped three projects.

I’m still underwater but do you know what? This productivity lark works.