I’ve been trying to read up on how people use OmniFocus for meetings and am having trouble completely wrapping my head around effective practices.
My Situation
I am a part of several different organizations – I’m a freelancer and volunteer on a few boards, on which I serve on various committees. This means I have a wide variety of meeting contexts (let’s say about 10 total). In some cases I simply attend the meetings, in other cases I run the meetings or play some type of administrative role (e.g. soliciting meeting materials from participants).
For each of these domains I have a [Single Action Project] (e.g. [ Library Board ]) which contains one-off tasks associated with that particular domain / client / whatever.
My Goals
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Throughout a week I would like to be able to jot down any ideas / agenda topics I plan to raise in any given meeting to OmniFocus. I would like these items to NOT fill my normal project view, which means I don’t want those agenda topics to appear as available tasks outside of the context of preparing for a meeting. That said, I also want to be able to, for instance, view “all agenda topics for my weekly meeting with the superintendent” so that I’m not sifting through 500 irrelevant items from other organizations while preparing for a given meeting.
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I would like any relevant administrative tasks for a meeting (e.g. “draft an agenda” “distribute the agenda” etc.) to regularly appear as available (recurring) tasks.
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I would like to avoid creating a huge organization overhead / clutter in OmniFocus (I admit I’m having trouble understanding when it’s better to create a new project vs simply use the appropriate [Single Action Project]).
My Question
How do folks handle tracking meetings? Should I create a permanent (e.g. I never mark it as complete) project for each meeting type with recurring tasks related to the administration? Should I have a single project that captures ALL my meetings with recurring tasks, regardless of the organization they’re associated with?
Should I just store those tasks as a recurring item-set in my [Single Action Project] associated with the relevant organization instead of creating a new project just for those tasks? (I’m generally unsure when it’s more appropriate to create a new project as opposed to just creating a nested task list within the [Single Action Project].)
Should I store my agenda topics in the same project that contains those administrative tasks, or should I have a separate project to track agenda items? Should I have a SINGLE project for tracking agenda items overall?
I would love to know how others approach this kind of problem!