Long-time readers of this site will know that I’ve been a hard and fast OmniFocus user for almost five years now. However, for more than a year, I’ve actually been using a hybrid system for my task management: combining both digital and analog in my everyday juggling act.

If you’re familiar with the Eisenhower / Covey Matrix then you know all about Urgent vs Important. Of course, you don’t have to be familiar with the Urgent/Important Matrix to know that many tasks are urgent but that doesn’t mean they’re important. And, how often does the truly important work we need to do sit quietly for us to act on it, instead of crying out for our attention?

Being able to define and then act upon what it is that is most important for us to do is a skill indeed.

And for me, I believe the reason I’ve settled into using a hybrid system of both paper and digital is because it serves me well in my pursuit to show up every day and do my most important work.

For digital, I use OmniFocus. And for analog I have a Baron Fig notebook and Signo DX 0.38mm pen. These two tools each serve as the different storehouses for the different quadrants of urgent and important.1

In general, my most important activities for the day are written down in my Baron Fig notebook — and almost always they are written down the day before.

OmniFocus is where I keep anything with a due date, as well as all the other administrative miscellany of my job. OmniFocus is for work that is important but not Most Important. Like many of you, I suspect, I’m at my computer for the bulk of my working hours. Thus, virtually all of the incoming tasks I need to capture are of the digital kind: they deal with emails, bills, invoices, website edits, servers, files, graphics, etc. And OmniFocus is great for this (as would be any digital task management app worth its salt).

I break up my day with writing and important-but-not-urgent tasks in the morning followed by administrative and other tasks in the afternoon. Or, in other words, I spend the first half of my day with the Baron Fig and the second half with OmniFocus.

There’s no reason I couldn’t just keep everything in OmniFocus or in the Baron Fig.2 But I like this hybrid approach.

There is something concrete to the act of using a pen to write down my most important tasks onto a piece of paper. And there’s something ever-so-slightly less distracting about coming downstairs and having a notebook open and waiting, listing out in my own handwriting what it is I need to get to straight away.

When I open up OmniFocus, as awesome as it is, it’s still full of buttons and colors and widgets and options. While these can be minimized (something I love about OF), I’m still an incessant fiddler and the last thing I need is something to fiddle with when I’m supposed to be writing.