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Don1
2009-05-31, 06:08 AM
I fear I am applying the application incorrectly and/or not as intended. I have read DA's book and viewed the tutorials but still do not feel at ease with the programs. I am trying to set up the system as a start-up business owner who wears several hats on a daily basis. Each hat represents a future department human resources (employee payroll, benefits administration, hiring, de-hiring, etc), finance (accounting, bookkeeping, budgeting, bill collecting, etc.), sales (soliciting and closing of new jobs), job management (scheduling jobs won, tracking time and material to provide accounting), mechanic (equipment maintenance and repair), and more. In theory, as we grow, each department will become somewhat autonomous—at least separate individuals will take over the responsibilities.

That being said, I have set up project folders for each "department. Potentially, this might be the incorrect way of setting OF up. I read some threads and maybe these should be contexts. That worries me because I cannot relegate an action to more than one context. Again, perhaps I am not setting things up correctly. Example: I need to go to the post office to mail invoices but I also need to go to the post office to mail proposals. This would be two entries (not efficient) for the same errand. Another example: I need to talk to a client about a job we are working on but I also need to talk to the clients accounts payable department about a past due invoice.

How do I properly set this up? Are there examples available to see online for different industries? We are in the property management industry.

I have other newbie concerns also but let this be a starting point.

needles27
2009-05-31, 10:02 AM
When I first came to OF and GTD I had a similar situation with a lot of questions about how to set up the best system. I read lots of post about best practices, and I finally realized that the beauty of OF is that it allows such flexibility to set up a system that works best for each individual's needs. There doesn't seem to be any right way, but at the same time there are also a lot of common ways to use it appropriately.

One of your questions asked if it would be good to set up all of your different "hats" as contexts. This doesn't seem to be the way to go. Contexts should always boil down to a place, an object, a state of mind, a person, etc. "Finance" doesn't work well as a context since that could mean any number of things. In your examples, "Post Office" would work really well as a context, a grouping where many actions spanning different projects/departments can live. So, you can click on the "Post Office" context and see every action that needs to happen there from any project you have set up. Or, you can widen that context to a more general "Errands."

Your idea of setting up all of these different "hats" as folders seems to me to be perfect. You will have many open projects, and the best organization is to probably divide them up by your areas of responsibility. Some people divide projects by Home/Work or Work/Creative, etc. You can even go with more finely detailed folders nested inside other folders. It is always a balance between good organization vs. a cumbersome mess of folders/projects. Whatever helps you focus in on a set of grouped projects is best.

As far as multiple actions in one context from different projects, here too you can do things in a variety of ways. If OF is truly going to act as your external brain, you want to make sure you don't have to stop and think, "Did I already add 'Go to the Post Office' in my accounting project, or should I add it to the new proposals project?" I would add it to anything as it comes to mind, with the appropriate due dates, etc. That way, when you click on your "Post Office" context, you might see multiple actions needed there....perfect! That is exactly what this is designed for. Maybe one of the actions isn't due quite yet, but as long as you are there, take care of it.

Another way to take care of it is to use the note feature. You can add one instance of "Go to Post Office" in one of your projects, and then create a list in the notes of all the things you need to take care of there. As you are thinking of the post office in your accounting section, add a note to take care of something for your proposals section - doesn't matter how it's organized in the system, it just gets done.

I'm not sure if this was helpful, but I am happy to try again on this or help out with any other question - OF has been an amazing system for me and I am happy to try and give my experiences with my best practices.

whpalmer4
2009-05-31, 10:17 AM
That being said, I have set up project folders for each "department. Potentially, this might be the incorrect way of setting OF up. I read some threads and maybe these should be contexts. That worries me because I cannot relegate an action to more than one context. Again, perhaps I am not setting things up correctly. Example: I need to go to the post office to mail invoices but I also need to go to the post office to mail proposals. This would be two entries (not efficient) for the same errand.

In my opinion, you should not worry about the fact that you might have multiple "take XYZ to post office for mailing" actions active at once. If you set the context for those actions to something like Errands:Post Office, OF allows you to easily view all of the actions you might take in a given context, such as a trip to the Post Office. Those actions have nothing to do with each other except that you accomplish them all in the same place, so trying to somehow combine them into one is not the way to go. If you did somehow manage to do so (perhaps a daily "Take daily outgoing materials to Post Office" action) you would still need some means of tracking all the different items that should be handled in that task, and you've lost the accountability from any given project for the materials being handled properly. If you forget to take the proposals on the trip to the Post Office, you've still got the incomplete action there to remind you that it hasn't been done in my scheme, but in the "Take daily outgoing materials to the Post Office" scheme you've lost track. You can't look at a project and know with any confidence that you took that document to be mailed


Another example: I need to talk to a client about a job we are working on but I also need to talk to the clients accounts payable department about a past due invoice.


Again, I would decompose this into multiple tasks to be tracked separately. A good model is to consider how you would keep track of the things to be done if you had some people you could delegate the work to. If you had your accounting department call the A/P department, and your creative genius talk to theirs, with a little bit of success hopefully those two roles will be filled by different people, right?

Don1
2009-05-31, 01:55 PM
These comments do help. Additional advise is appreciated. I am much better at seeing something already set up and modifying it to my needs than creating something from new. Presently I will stick with the Department/Project setup and will need to tweek the contexts provided by OF.

I wonder if I am setting things up correctly? Example: finance project>bookkeeping task list>pay bills. Do you or do you not list the bills individually (which the accounting software already does) and there are many. Of course paying a bill has several tasks if broken down. There is the task of paying/reporting the bill in the accounting software. There is the actual printing of the checks (computer context?) if that is the appropriate method. There is the making a payment electronically (online context?) if that is the appropriate method. Then the post office trip (errand: post office context), if needed.

Perhaps creating a "pay bills" task set to a specific day of the week and recurring weekly and just using the accounting system to manage the specifics of who. The payment methods would then not be recorded. Isn't that an important part of GTD?

whpalmer4
2009-05-31, 02:58 PM
Track things at the level of detail that you need to track to make sure they get done. You'll have to decide what that level of detail is for yourself. One of the factors I use to decide that for myself is how likely I am to be called away from a task, and how much context I'll need to get back to where I was before being interrupted, and to ensure that all the necessary steps are completed. If it is crucial that steps be carried out in a particular order, or with a particular timing, I'm going to put more detail into that project, because it will help guide me through the process. Many things may turn out to be cookie-cutter operations (paying the bills for regularly recurring expenses, for example) and can be neatly handled with repeating projects or Curt Clifton's Populate Template Placeholders scripts (available here (http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~clifton/software.html#PopTemp)) so you don't have a lot of extra typing to do. And there's nothing that says you have to track everything in OF, either, if you have something that does the job for you now. It might be reasonable to have a monthly "pay recurring bills" action that just reminds you to run your accounting package and cut all the checks there if it gives you the tools you need to track the payments.

Every month or quarter, take a little time to think about how well your tools served you, and where improvements would be welcome. You don't have to get your workflow, list of contexts/projects, organization, etc. perfect the first day. OmniFocus will let you evolve a system that works for you.

needles27
2009-05-31, 03:08 PM
Early on with my experience with OF, I learned what level of breaking down actions I was comfortable with. In the most strict aspect of GTD, you are supposed to break everything down to its most atomic level of action. However, I found that it became more work to spell out each step of certain activities and then mark them as complete rather than just assume I knew the small steps to complete something. If I had an action to make a PB&J sandwich, I didn't need to list every step along the way to make that sandwich complete.

Your situation sounds like if you had actions to pay your bills and your accounting software is set up in a way to make sure everything gets paid, then I would leave it at that - no need to duplicate all the specific actions in OF where you have to return and mark everything complete. OF can just remind you to head over to your accounting software to make it happen. For example, I do film/DVD production. If I have a project where I need to create a disc, I don't list every action in OF (Import footage, make menus, author DVD, burn disc, etc) since all of those steps happen in the software I use to make the DVDs - it would be extra work to enter all of those actions unnecessarily. But I do use OF to create an action to tell me to make a DVD as a part of a certain project.

And you mention an issue that OF wouldn't have recorded that each specific bill had been paid and how - unless you need some sort of record in OF of completed tasks or your accounting software doesn't have clear alerts if certain bills are unpaid, then I wouldn't worry about it. As long as it gets done, then it shouldn't matter...

pete340
2009-06-01, 03:29 AM
And you mention an issue that OF wouldn't have recorded that each specific bill had been paid and how - unless you need some sort of record in OF of completed tasks or your accounting software doesn't have clear alerts if certain bills are unpaid, then I wouldn't worry about it. As long as it gets done, then it shouldn't matter...

To underscore this: OF is, in part, about making sure that you don't lose track of things that need to be done. Bookkeeping software is about making sure you have detailed records of things that you have done. If you need to check whether you paid a particular bill, look in your checkbook (or your bookkeeping software).

Don1
2009-06-02, 10:23 AM
Again, many thanks.

I wonder if there is a feature or script that will do this:

A job is entered as a project. Once that project is complete I check it off in OF and it disappears. I then have to enter it as a invoice task. Can I make so that once I complete it as a project it automatically gets moved to or is created in the invoicing project folder?

whpalmer4
2009-06-02, 10:44 AM
Why not have invoicing be part of the project? Make up a job template that does all of the steps you do for each job (including getting paid), and use it to create a project for each job. It sounds like you are making a project for each job to do the job part, and then tossing the business of getting paid into another project that commingles the financial end of all of the jobs.

needles27
2009-06-02, 11:19 AM
I am getting how you are organizing your projects, and it might be working against you - if you have projects organized in folders by "new business" and "marketing" and "invoicing" etc, then that makes the possibility that one of your Jobs would have actions spread all over the place - and if that works best for you, then great. But it does create situations like the one you mentioned, where a new project comes in the door, and you have to go around to many different OF projects scattered in many different folders to update every action needed to complete this job. I do what whpalmer suggested which is to make one OF project (living in a folder named "Active Projects") for each work project I have open. That way, this one container can have every individual action needed to complete the project - from making a phone call to get the new business to depositing the check in the bank.

whpalmer4
2009-06-02, 11:59 AM
For an example illustration of what I mean, see this thread (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=12504).

Don1
2009-06-02, 12:08 PM
Ahh, says I. needles and whpalmer you are now unearthing the the cause of my frustrations and fears. I will review the provided illustration hoping it will enlighten me further.

Don1
2009-06-02, 04:20 PM
I like what I see (in the other thread) but, I wonder if this is the direction I should take. The ultimate goal is to grow the business so that each department is run by different people, each having their group of projects and tasks. That being said, I am open to some criticism on the present setup of projects/departments. In summary:

Sales Team: handles new leads, meeting prospective clients, selling jobs, biding projects.

Service Teams: handles job scheduling, material purchases, recording when, where, how much, etc. (they get the job done).

Finance Team: handles AP/AR, works in concert with each department manager to set budgets, and each supervisor to correctly enter daily expenses, time and materials.

HR: they have their tasks already established outside of client related tasks.

Potentially, what I am seeing is that the sales person could stay with the project up to and including invoicing, or potentially the service manager could create the invoices and hand over collections to finance.

A bit picky but I am hoping to set up these systems both in the business and in OF so that they 1. match, and 2. are easily picked up by any person who joins us.

ext555
2009-06-02, 06:16 PM
Ultimately it sounds like you'll need some sort of project app that can share a project with a team . You might check out the products at 37signals.com I think someone on the forum did some apple script that allows for tasks to be exported from those products to OF.

It shouldn't be hard to maanage the " team " view in basecamp etc and then have each unit manage their individual tasks in omni focus.

igorsutton
2009-07-10, 01:31 PM
I like what I see (in the other thread) but, I wonder if this is the direction I should take. The ultimate goal is to grow the business so that each department is run by different people, each having their group of projects and tasks. That being said, I am open to some criticism on the present setup of projects/departments.

I think the bit you're missing here is the fact that if you have everything grouped on one place, you're defining the process and the interactions your departments will have in the future.

To remember: a Project is a collection of actionable items, and Context (in GTD) is a set of minimal requirements you need to have the actionable item done i.e. to Call someone you need your phone, thus the Phone Context; to search something on Google you need to be Online; to drop something in the Post Office you need to go there in the first place, and so on.

Hope this helps.

lennie
2009-07-10, 04:49 PM
Don
You may want to sit down and detail you business process workflow. Define each step of your process and define responsibility; You can do this in omnigraffle for a graphic representation, omnioutliner if an outline approach is more your style, or even in word or other text program.
You can build templates for each department in OF and as your business grows assign the templates to new departments. To be sure a project is not dropped between departments create a task to notify the next department of the handoff (e.g. Service finishes job have a task to notify finance to initiate billing).

omniinmo
2009-07-30, 05:09 PM
Don
You may want to sit down and detail you business process workflow. Define each step of your process and define responsibility; You can do this in omnigraffle for a graphic representation, omnioutliner if an outline approach is more your style, or even in word or other text program.
You can build templates for each department in OF and as your business grows assign the templates to new departments. To be sure a project is not dropped between departments create a task to notify the next department of the handoff (e.g. Service finishes job have a task to notify finance to initiate billing).

This last suggestion seems right on point but it brings the notion of modifying your setup as your company grows. It's probably a very good idea to think of your work processes but you probably want to stay lean as you avoid conceptual overhead. Departments usually emerge naturally as needed to facilitate processing of larger volumes of information in larger organizations but they are by no means the only way of organizing processing of data. Departments are one way of thinking about how to get things done. For now you can set yourself up to what works to get rolling on a smaller setup (and it may not involve thinking about departmental segregation so much) so that you can cleanly accomplish all your tasks while keeping the company afloat. As the company grows, chunks of your work processes can be migrated over to different departments as/if applicable.

omniinmo