Need to add "Status" or "Flagged" categories
 

Omnifocus is the 5th GTD app that I have tried over the last 2 weeks, it is great but would be GTD nirvana for my company if we could add additional status or flagged categories. In additional to the usual todo's we would like to use it to track the internal sales cycle process in our company and would like to be able to assign and sort actions and projects with 11 additional status conditions - quoted, waiting on approval, approved needs delegation, etc... We could use any field for this purpose as long as it can be filtered or sorted. With other GTD done apps I have worked around this limitation by using contexts for this purpose but then we lose the intended value of the context field.

New to Mac, new to GTD, new to Omnifocus, any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

[QUOTE=TJH;55043]Omnifocus is the 5th GTD app that I have tried over the last 2 weeks, it is great but would be GTD nirvana for my company if we could add additional status or flagged categories. In additional to the usual todo's we would like to use it to track the internal sales cycle process in our company and would like to be able to assign and sort actions and projects with 11 additional status conditions - quoted, waiting on approval, approved needs delegation, etc... We could use any field for this purpose as long as it can be filtered or sorted. With other GTD done apps I have worked around this limitation by using contexts for this purpose but then we lose the intended value of the context field.

New to Mac, new to GTD, new to Omnifocus, any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks![/QUOTE]

Seriously, what you're looking for is not a GTD app. It's a CRM app.

Look at MarketCircle's Daylite. Or maybe Elements SBM (though the latter is a fairly expensive, hosted solution).

[QUOTE=TJH;55043]In additional to the usual todo's we would like to use it to track the internal sales cycle process in our company and would like to be able to assign and sort actions and projects with 11 additional status conditions - quoted, waiting on approval, approved needs delegation, etc...[/QUOTE]

Doesn't each one of those states imply that you're working on a different low-level action for your task, which perhaps requires its own context? Rather than having one action with an always changing state, it seems like you might want to structure each sales project something like this:
[LIST=1][*]Send quote to [client] @email[*]Wait for approval from [client] @waiting[*]…[/LIST]
Does that make sense?

If each of these client projects follows the same formula, you might want to make it easier to pre-populate all the phases by creating a template project and using that to create new projects.

We're planning to offer richer support for templates at some point, but you can create your own templates right now by creating a Templates folder, setting its status to Dropped, and creating template projects inside that folder. When you want to use a template, you can copy it from that folder and paste it wherever you want it. (You can also duplicate and place it all at once by Option-Dragging the template onto your project sidebar).

Or, if you want to get a little more fancy (with automatic replacement of placeholders, automatic adjustment of dates, etc.), you might try Curt Clifton's great [URL="http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~clifton/software.html#PopTemp"]Populate Template Placeholders[/URL] script.

Thanks Cat, I'll check out Daylite, the omnifocus features are excellent for us, just wish it had 1 more layer of sorting task and projects, even the multiple tag feature in "Things" would be great

Ken,
I will use omnifocus for more than the sales cycle but as far as the cycle itself, it does always follow the same formula. I'd like to get our requirements figured out in omnifocus because it has so many other features that fit perfectly with how we operate, iphone synch through mobile me. We are a small company and just don't have the resources for a CRM yet but still need a structured way to "get things done". I'll try some of your suggestions, thanks for the help.