Single action projects
 

Hey all, I am new to Omnifocus. I am finding myself with a lot of projects which contain one action.

So I might have a project called File Expense Reports. But then if I want it to show up in my Context view I need to give it a task. So I end up with a task called File Expense Reports in that project. This seems kind of silly.

Another might be calling a business partner, or setting up a meeting. They are quite separate and grouping them, while possible, does not make sense conceptually. I´d only be doing it so that I could avoid this problem of creating single actions within projects.

Does this make sense? Have other people run into this?

Ideally, I´d like a project without any actions to be an action in and of itself. Meaning, I could assign a context to it.

File > Single-Action List. Then put all your single actions into it and assign contexts to each. You can create multiple such lists with category names if you like: "Finance", etc., but from what you've described, a single list might suffice.

Bob

One of the nice things about the single action lists is that you can easily convert an action into a project if appropriate. For example, your expense report: normally writing it and doing it as a single action might be the right level of granularity/detail for you. But this week, you realize as you fill out the form that you forgot to bring in the receipt from some unexpected expense, and you need it to file the report. Drag the single action "file expense report for XYZ trip" out to the sidebar (or simply outdent it) to make it into a project, then add "find receipt for roadside assistance charges" with an appropriate context, followed by "deliver report to accounting", you get the picture. If you do it by outdenting (cmd-[) OF will even add it to the selection of projects you are viewing in that window automatically so you can just make your edits without having to track it down. I flesh out projects from Inbox entries this way all the time and it works quite nicely.