This is the first in a series of posts about OmniFocus that I’ve been thinking about for ages. I’m going to keep them short to eliminate excuses for not getting to them.

For the unfamiliar, OmniFocus is a OS X application based on the Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen. I’ve been an avid user for over five years and it is central to my productivity both personally and professionally. These posts will presume you’re generally familiar with the software. If not, they may not make complete sense.

Since I use OmniFocus for nearly everything in my life, it has become chock-full of projects and tasks. As a result, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with all the tasks in an unfiltered list. To make things jump out, I’ve started using Emoji (えもじ) to add small pictographs to the task. The results are quite fun.

Using Emoji in OmniFocus

You can click the picture to see the full size which should make them easier to make out. The cool thing is that if I’m using a device with a Retina display, they are quite discernible and let me scan a list very quickly. The only downside is that I’m limited to the ~250 symbols that exist. You’d think that’d be enough but there are a few I have to do with out; for example, is a ‘printer’ too dated?.