The Omni Group

Last week, your humble support ninja got this in an email from a customer:

It would be nice to select which tasks/projects I want to have printed out and get some more information on my piece of paper (e.g. dates).

This is pretty easy to do, and I figured other folks might want to do this as well, so up on the blog it goes!

OmniFocus has a feature called “Perspectives” which allows you to set up different views of your information that you'd like to access quickly and easily. For example, I have one perspective saved that focuses on my Support Ninja tasks and another that shows all my completed actions, which flip over to during those “when did i do that task again?” moments I occasionally have.

More importantly, I also have a “To-Go” perspective that shows the contexts for going out and running errands, but not the ones like 'desk', 'office', or 'home'. Whenever I need a new task list, I just switch to that perspective, print my task list, and off I go.

To set this up, do the following:

Switch to context view, then set the window up as you'd like your to-go task list to look. Command-click the relevant contexts to select them, change up the view bar settings, and so forth. Get everything looking how you'd like it to look on paper.

Next, select Perspectives -> Show Perspectives Window from the menu bar. Press the “Plus” button in the lower left. Name the new perspective “To-Go”, or “Printed Task List”, or whatever you'd like.

When you set the perspective up, we add an item for it under the Perspectives menu. From now on, anytime you want to print your task list, just select that menu item and print. We'll apply the settings you specified for you, saving you the effort of twiddling everything yourself.

Pro tip: if the Perspectives window is showing on screen, you can just select the perspective in the window, then hit the quick print button at the bottom. We'll print your list without switching your window to that perspective.

And if you ever want to change how the printout looks, just activate the perspective, adjust how the window is set up, and press the button with the camera icon. We'll save the new settings into your perspective for you.

(One neat trick I used this for - to use less paper, use File -> Page Setup to set the scale to something less than 100%, so you get more tasks on less paper. We'll save that setting into the perspective, too.)

Enjoy!