October 16th, 2013 Less OmniFocus friction with maildrop

I may be late to the party on this one but just last week I set up a maildrop email address for Omnifocus.

It freaking rocks.

Friction

My old friction with Omnifocus and getting item in from my iPhone dealt with copy and paste.

If I was viewing a site I wanted to come back to I had to highlight the URL then copy. Open Omnifocus paste the URL on the notes field.

Then go back to the page and copy/paste any relevant text in to the notes field.

Then write out the task so it made sense to my later self.

This process isn’t huge. It only takes a few second really but it is cumbersome.

With a maildrop email all I do is select ‘email’ from my sharing options and adjust the subject so the task reads right.

A few seconds later I have a task in my inbox.

It halves the time but more importantly it reduced the friction by 10x.

The increased friction of the old way meant I tried to remember things. That’s just a bad idea. If you don’t write it down it didn’t happen.

A lot of things I wanted to do dropped off my day to day radar because I didn’t write it down.

If you use Omnifocus and don’t have a maildrop email get one. You can find instructions on the OmniFocus site.

If you don’t use Omnifocus how can you remove some friction from you capture system today?