Thank you for your kindness, Sir.
To everybody:
I‘ve seen so many threads here, incompletely answering questions about „How do I tackle this or that use case?“ with partial descriptions of OF3 structures only … one has to consider the whole GTD/IT/psychological universe one is in for a truly enlightening anwer.
Please challenge me here in this thread, I‘d love to show you how I do it in my universe. I‘m truly exited about learning and improving together with you all.
Ah, I forgot to mention a few things that didn‘t change with OF3:
Split view, again: you can create an appointment from an action. Little context is transferred, but there‘s a linkback. I prefer my workflow I mentioned, but this will often do as well and is quicker in case you‘ve already got split view open. Or, which I often do: in case I have OF hovering right off the right side of the screen.
One more split view thing: Remember that highlighting a block / multiple blocks of text and dragging&dropping them into OF will create an actions / multiple actions with the text as the name of the actions. Seldom useful (unless you‘ve written the text yourself to be a list of truly actionable items, say: meeting notes you‘ve written yourself for distribution to the participants), but, as I said, „know your tools“. Unfortunately, the reverse is not working reliably: you can‘t reliably drag multiple actions (or even one) into an eMail. You can try and then count the items transferred - it does work sometimes. If not, revert to good old copy and paste or share-sheet-mail single actions as a mail.
Set up and train Siri to understand your contact names. Often, when walking from one building on campus to the next, I call up my ‚talk‘ perspective and squeeze in a call on my Airpods.
OK, I confess: I have one more top level tag, right at the beginning of my tag list. It‘s „? Review“ with the question mark being the big red questionmark icon. The above has been one of the use cases for that: Walking to a meeting, on the phone, no opportunity to create the next intelligent actions from the result of my talk. But time enough to append that icon. You‘ll see it, as the action is still on your list, you know that you need to work on that action.
Second use case: during those meetings. I can only seldom really, really tick off an item as complete during the meeting and be truly done with it. Append that icon.
Careful: This tag doesn‘t merit a special perspective or so. You‘d be tempted to create a separate hierarchy, a second inbox. Bad. Understand it to mean something like „it’s not fully completed“ (which would be a ticked circle), „but it‘s not valid any more, as it stands right now“ (which would be an unticked circle). It‘s a half-ticked circle, so to say. Work from the lists you have.
Set up and train Siri to understand you dictating tasks into the default task folder in the native app reminders. Set up OF to grab that folder‘s items and to move it into the OF inbox for further processing. Do that on both iPhone and iPad, even though Omni does not recommend it. Better to have that item twice (never actually happened, actually) than having to wait for OF to fire up on your iPhone (might be an hour from now, by all means), sync OF, your iPad to sync OF until you‘ve finally got it in your iPads inbox (happened often, initially).
Use the text response possibilities for calls you declined. in case you just want to decline, hit „remind me in an hour“ and this will be automatically a due item in your OF inbox. Set up 3 pertinent text answers, otherwise. I‘m using more socially acceptable forms of „f… off, send me a mail instead“, „if urgent, call me again, immediately, to signal urgency, otherwise f… off & email me“ and „Thanks for f… my schedule, now I‘ve got to call you back ASAP“. Unfortunately, with the last answer, you do have to dictate a task to Siri (or type it in manually, iOS not supporting share-sheeting a phone number) and due-date it an hour from now (in case you forget).
I don‘t answer voicemails (from lowranking colleagues), as the mostly unintelligible ramblings leave me with more questions than answers plus an obligation to call them back - When I see one, I immediately send them a text „didn‘t understand the f… you were talking about, - network quality? -, send me an email“. They got used to it.
Even when answering the phone, if they want to hang new actions on me, I often end the conversation there & then with „f…, write me an email“.
I am playacting as being that rude only to make a teaching point: Remeber! They want something from you and you‘ve got to nudge them to use your inbox for that. For me: email. Example: You can‘t even copy text from facebook on iOS - it‘s all about locking you in -, one more reason not to use it more than necessary. I don‘t accept any friend requests there, so I don’t have to reply to PMs. Again: they get used to it, even our mayor did.
For friends & family we use WhatsApp, if necessary, and Threema (no adress pulling, metadata mapping, software from Switzerland, server in Switzerland) - you can copy text from that, at least, and practically all of those texts are nice and cozy anyhow, demand little and give a lot.
In case they weren‘t? In the meantime you know what my response strategy would be…
Again, if your emails are on an exchange: Also sync notes, contacts and ToDos. The first two are obvious. For ToDos: In Outlook on Windows, hit Ctrl+Shit+T to create a task from an eMail, give it an actionable name and save it to the default folder. It‘ll be in your OF inbox without (a) you having to go thru the public Omni Sync Server (no-no for confidential stuff) plus (b) it includes the original mail in it‘s proper formatting (if set up in this way in Outlook)(not the abomination that the Sync Server 🤮 into your Inbox). I‘ve got the free version of Outlook installed on the iPad/iPhone in case I want to view it (no accounts set up there, though)
