One of the more challenging things about GTD is to get your daily work done. At least a lot of people I’ve seen fell into the organise and plan trap which gets you focussed on having everything planned, in your lists and trusted systems. But making sure you get your minimum done and your system up-to-date on a daily basis is where the rubber hits the road.

I’ve started using to repeating ‘projects’ in OmniFocus to start and end my day with some level of diligence. My ‘Morning Routine’ is repeating itself daily and is due at 8am, when I’ve typically settled myself in the office, had my go at my news sites, RSS feeds and a bit of email pre-screening.

Let’s look at the individual tasks in my Morning Routine:

• Bring Entourage Inbox to Zero: Following Merlin’s Mann Inbox Zero methodology, the first thing for me is to empty my Entourage Inbox following standard GTD parameters. Less than 2 minute answers, quick delegation, hot-key importing of actionable items to OmniFocus, trash to trash, archive FYI/CC mails.
• Bring OmniFocus Inbox to Zero: After importing all the actionable mail items, I quickly scan through them and make sure each of them has a context, possibly a project and some time associated with it. Hit the “Clean up” button in OmniFocus - done.
• Tag new documents in DropBox: I use a folder called “DropBox” to drop all documents I receive or create throughout the day. Once a day, well, in the morning, I use Leap to tag the documents. This is required by the type of reference material or archiving system I follow which I will cover in a later post.
• Archive documents from DropBox: Moving documents from the DropBox to the appropriate folders in my folder hierarchy
• Review Top 3 actions/agenda for the day: Following some ideas of ZTD by Zen Habits’ Leo I simply scan through all my actions in OmniFocus (pre-flagged for weekly focus) and any meetings/calls scheduled for the day and decide on those 3 that I definitely would like to complete that day.

Surely your morning routine might be different or more comprehsive, but I like to keep it down to the bare minimum and completed in the first 20mins of my working day. So no matter what you need to do, here is how to create the repeating “Morning Routine” project.

Setup a new project by using the “+” button at the bottom of OmniFocus left-panel. Best to keep it on the root-level of the Library as you will constantly refer back to it (ideally daily). You may also use the menu item under “File > Add New Project” or the equivalent keyboard short-cut.

Next give it the “Morning Routine” name and add, in the right sequence, all those actions to it, that you want to complete in the first 20-30mins of your day. I would recommend to not go overboard here, since it is very likely that once your day gets going you will be interrupted by calls, meetings, emails or annoying office fellows and consequently fail to complete your Morning Routine.

Once you have all your actions defined, you need to set the reoccurrence of the project and it’s due time using the Inspector in OmniFocus. If you do not have the Inspector open all the time like myself, use the menu “Inspectors > Show Inspectors” or the equivalent keyboard short-cut.

Next select the project we’ve just created. Make sure you have the “project view” in the Inspector and set the reoccurrence to “Repeat every 1 days”. The due date should be the time you are ready for your morning review - in my case it is 8.30am. In the case you run late with your morning routine make sure you set the “Repeat from” to “Assigned date” so that OmniFocus sticks with 8.30am every morning. Otherwise it might simply set the next due date to the time you’ve managed to complete your morning routine.

That’s it. Pretty simple, but keeps you on track every day. Would be great to see which actions you have in your morning routine. This typically delivers a lot of inspiration for other people.