Should I have
Waiting:Colleague1 & Agenda:Colleague1
or
Colleague1:Waiting & Colleague1:Agenda
If only I had #tags
Are #tags ever coming to OF, seem to have been discussed so many time, should I give up waiting?
This is the thread to follow:
Thank you, I will take a look, meanwhile 2do has also caught my attention.
I do think that in today’s highly connected world the GTD idea of a strict adherence to a single Context is quite outdated.
Going back to my original problem I have to find a workaround as having to look in two places every time I connect with colleague1 is really slowing me down.
I think my current favoured approach is to have People:colleague1 and then to make the task descriptive, is, Waiting for colleague1 to… or Ask colleague1 about…
Thank you for your help
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Hi,
I am not sure what I prefer. Sometimes tags are handy, but they quickly get out of hand and proliferate in such a way, that organizing them becomes hard work. The same is true for all n:n connections. When I really want to set them up correctly, it takes more time and hassle then the results are worth it.
Regarding your problem: I read a nice hint: Name all tasks in a way that would allow an understanding third person to perform them. So all agenda items have something like: “Ask Steve”, “Agenda Steve” etc. The same in Waiting for, Phone, Email.
Now, I have one perspective that selects these contexts in the side bar. I call it communication. I open the perspective and enter “Steve” in the search field and get all issues open with Steve. Very handy when I see the guy or have him on the phone.
This idea comes from Sven Fechner (sp?) I think and it works both in iOS and OSX.
Best regards,
Ralf
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This is exactly the approach I take, and in fact I’ve gone a couple of steps further. Firstly, I generally avoid action verbs and simply prefix the task with the person’s name. So, for example, I’d have a task for “Steve: Ask for status update on Palmer Proposal.” Most of these go into a “Communicate” context as well, although there are sometimes exceptions.
The other step further is that if you’re using OmniFocus Pro, you can create custom perspectives with built-in searches. Anybody that has a lot of regular action items in this regard gets their own perspective that highlights only those tasks that contain their name, so that can quickly be pulled up from OmniFocus on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad without having to perform a search. You could even in theory get access to it from the Apple Watch (bring up the “Steve” context before meeting with Steve and it will be right on your wrist).
This can also be expanded to a pseudo-tag system that has been discussed in these forums as a workaround for years. Basically, you can add a hashtag to the end of any task and then use that in searches. It’s not the most elegant solution since you get extra cruft in your task names, but it works quite well both for searches and custom perspectives.
3 Likes
@jdh & @ralf - thank you I can see how this can work, I will take a look - this might just save me wasting time evaluating 2do.
Regards
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Multiple context per task are a separate issue. Tags cover so much more than contexts do…
