The week that my family and I spent at the Jersey Shore was rejuvenating for all of us, but I've paid a price since coming back to work. OmniFocus, which was so helpful to me over the first four weeks of my new job, has been an intimidating taskmaster since I got back.

The whole thing began with my good intentions. I was feeling really good about the mental sweeps I had been doing prior to vacation. Thanks to my long commute on the train, I can sometimes fit in a daily mental sweep. The combination of mental sweeps and focused action at the office helped me achieve more than I thought was possible in a month.

I really thought I could take a week off from Getting Things Done (GTD) while I was in Stone Harbor, NJ. Maybe this would have been possible with a more formal advance planning, but I walked away with some unrealistic personal task due dates. When I came back everything that should have been next actions was past due.

I also knew in a general sense what I would need to do at work when I got back, but I hadn't planned the work even at a high level before I left. So when I got back, I effectively had no next actions that were truly actionable.

What I didn't realize over this time was that the OmniFocus desktop app for the Mac had implemented a registry of syncing devices that was keeping track of how often I had synced OmniFocus for the iPhone and iPod Touch with the OmniFocus data on my WebDAV server. So when I finally started up OmniFocus on my Mac, it asked me if I was still using that iPhone and if I wanted the desktop app to forget the iPhone was part of my life.

I had a lot of catching up to do to make OmniFocus my friend again, but the folks at work wanted me to dive right into a new development project. This involved project planning and Subversion repository setup work with which I was unfamiliar. I didn't have the bandwidth to plow through the OmniFocus mess and this unfamiliar work at the same time.

If you made the sacrifices necessary to implement GTD in your life like I did, don't let this happen to you. Recognize that OmniFocus can't really appreciate the vacation concept on its own. You have to help it by thinking ahead and pushing out due dates on tasks to a reasonable point beyond your return from vacation.

An alternative would be to continue managing your projects, contexts, and tasks while on vacation. But that may not be fair to your family, if you have one.

If anybody has a better solution than the ones I've discussed, I'd love to hear it.