Nice question :D
Well, I used to have Email, Text/Tweet and other contexts and also an Agendas context. then I combined everything in one, sometimes called People, sometimes called Agendas as I also thought they were very similar…
Now I have them separate, but showing up together, in this order (1st Communicate, then People/Agendas), on a perspective I call Collaborate (name borrowed from @deturbulence).
The logic behind them is:
-
Communicate for me, combines any one-off calls, emails, messages, tweets, replies on instant messengers I have to do. And I always start my tasks with a verb followed by a colon.
Examples of tasks are: -
Message: Carl: invite for bbq next weekend
-
Email: reply to Tomasz re: project X
-
Call: XYZ clinic to schedule an appointment with Dr. Z (dentist)
-
People/Agendas is for people I regularly interact with. I used to have sub contexts for the more regular people. Not anymore. Now every task starts a with a person name.
Examples of tasks are: -
Mom: help to setup her new iPhone
-
AlanT discuss project ZYX
-
MikeX: reply re: [Fwd: Customer T complaints]
-
AlanD: follow-up about issue Y at customer B
The Collaborate perspective is grouped by Context, sorted by name.
This way, my example tasks above would show up as this
Communicate
Call: XYZ clinic to schedule an appointment with Dr. Z (dentist)
Email: reply to Tomasz re: [project X - meeting report]
Message: Carl: invite for bbq next weekend
People/Agendas
AlanD: follow-up about issue Y at customer B
AlanT discuss project ZYX
Mom: help to setup her new iPhone
Mike: check on status/actions about [Fwd: Customer T complaints]
Some comments:
- Daily, when I visit this perspective in the morning, I flag the tasks I want on my Today perspective. Quite often from the Communicate context, not so often from the People/Agendas context.
- I’m used to calling this perspective and searching within it for the name of a person (followed by a colon “:”) when I stumble upon them, or proactively go to them (or having them coming to me) to discuss something. (eg. if Mike comes to me, I normally remember to check my “Mike:” list). If I have several topics to discuss with my brother (or mom, or colleague), I might create a “Call: brother” task, flag it (very important on my workflow), and when I call, I search for the person’s name on the same perspective and have in hands all I want to discuss with the person.
- It also happens that when I sit to make some phone calls, or have to write an email, I take a look into this perspective and see if I can write other emails or make other phone calls (the sort order plays a big role here, as it simplifies things for me)
- For the people I normally interact with, I’m used to always add a “:” (colon) after their name, so my searches also return any task I might have added for them, regardless of context.
- The idea of starting the tasks with the person’s name makes it very easy to change the task from the People/Agendas context to my Wait for… context, or the other way round.
- Note that some of the tasks have an email subject in between quotes (eg. [project X - meeting report]). Whenever relevant, I try to leave email subjects in the task title, between square brackets. This helps me easily see the task has some reference, or was originated, from an email and it’s handy not only to have the email content right there in OmniFocus, but also helps to find the email thread if I need to.
This is the way I found it works best for me, but… I see (and have experimented) many others ways.
Hope it answered your question. ;-)
Update
After reading the great ideas (post below) from @deturbulence…
…I now have:
- Communicate : Book Meeting
- Communicate : Call
- Communicate : Email
- Communicate : Message (for IM, Tweet, Facebook, Linkedin)
- Communicate : Other (for other communication ways not used as often, like forum posts)
