I am a huge fan of Omni­Fo­cus for Mac and iPhone, so I thought I would share some things that I feel give Omni­Fo­cus the edge for task management.

1. Esti­mated Time: Being able to add the amount of time to each action is an invalu­able tool, allow­ing me to quickly glance at actions by time needed. I like to sort this way when I fin­ish a task and have only lim­ited time before a meet­ing / errand that needs to be done.
2. View Bar / Focus­ing: There is a pair of glasses that sits in the tool­bar of Omni­Fo­cus that allows you to dail in on what you are look­ing for. You need to use this. Using this fea­ture can call out the data that you want to see. Related to this is the abil­ity to Focus on a project (control-command-F). This takes away all other projects so that you can switch between the var­i­ous view meth­ods with­out the clut­ter of other projects. I find this incred­i­ble use­ful when you have a large project going.
3. File Links: Did you know that you can drag most files into an action? Not only that, but you can drag in emails. When you do this Omni­Fo­cus will cre­ate a link to that file or email. Click it and it will take you there. I love doing this for out­lines of blog posts that I make in OmniOut­liner, or for emails that need fur­ther action, or that an action is in ref­er­ence to. This is eas­ily one of the best fea­tures of the pro­gram, though not exclu­sive to OmniFocus.
4. Quick Entry: Most all task man­agers now imple­ment this in one form or another. You can cus­tomize a key­board short­cut in Omni­Fo­cus and when you press it you get a quick entry screen to put in new tasks. What sep­a­rates this from most other task man­agers is that you can enter in more than one task. You can also tell Omni­Fo­cus how much data you want to enter. If you fill out the action name/project/context/due date there is noth­ing more for you to do later. If you only fill out the name it sits in your Inbox in Omni­Fo­cus until you process it.
5. Sin­gle Action Lists: Most Omni­Fo­cus users are prob­a­bly used to cre­at­ing new projects with actions inside of them. How­ever you can also cre­ate what Omni­Fo­cus calls Sin­gle Action Lists. Where you put actions that don’t require a project, such as “get cash from ATM.”
6. Start Times: Every­body assigns due dates to actions (hope­fully), but did you know that you can also assign start times as well? There are a lot of actions that you can’t do until a cer­tain time passes, this is where start times come into play. They make the action unavail­able until the start time. For exam­ple if I need to ask Jim some­thing, but I know that he is at lunch until 1p, and I need to ask him it before 5p, here is what I would do and why. I would input the task to Omni­Fo­cus, assign a start date of today at 1p, and due date of today at 5p. Now that action will not show up as avail­able in the Due Soon focus of Omni­Fo­cus until after 1p. Using start times can really help you to focus on what you can do right now, ver­sus you run­ning around try­ing to remem­ber where Jim went.
7. Par­al­lel and Sequen­tial Project Flows: You can set a projects actions to either be par­al­lel or sequen­tial. Par­al­lel means that you can essen­tially do any of the actions at any time, no order at all. Sequen­tial means you do one actions after another, in the order they are listed. There are obvi­ous ben­e­fits to each sys­tems, and cer­tain sit­u­a­tions where you must have one or the other. To set this just click on the lit­tle arrows before the due date, and it will tog­gle between the to modes.
8. Detailed Con­texts: Con­texts are great, but as you may of noticed when you use Omni­Fo­cus, for the ‘Mac’ con­text you also have the sub con­texts of ‘Online’ and ‘Email’ you can set these up and more for each con­text you add. This abil­ity makes Omni­Fo­cus far more usable for me. I like to say that this is an ‘Errand’ / ‘Drug Store’ so that I can pull it up at the drug store when I am there with­out hav­ing to make a new project just for the drug store to have a list.
9. Loca­tion Aware­ness (iPhone only — for now): With the iPhone ver­sion of Omni­Fo­cus you can tap the tar­get to bring up a list of actions you can do — given where you cur­rently are located. The iPhone can also assign GPS coor­di­nates to con­texts using your cur­rent loca­tion, or and address. This, need­less to say, is not only very cool, but also very use­ful when you are out and about if you are using detailed con­texts in the man­ner I talked about above.
10. Cal­en­dar Reminders: With the lat­est ver­sion of Omni­Fo­cus for the iPhone you can now cre­ate a iCal cal­en­dar, that you sub­scribe to. Doing this causes Omni­Fo­cus to pop up a reminder on your screen when a task is due. I love to use this espe­cially for early morn­ing task, like bring XYZ to work today. Before I leave that alert pops up on my phone and I have yet to for­get to do some­thing if I put it in OmniFocus.

What are some of your tips? Leave them in the com­ments below.