How to deal with taskes/actions involving multiple people?
 

Hi

What is the recommended way to deal with tasks, or actions, like meetings or actions involving multple people? I've added individuals as contexts, but it doesn't seems to be possible to have multiple contexts?

Thanks,

Benoit

A context is a place or opportunity in which you have the necessary tools or facilities to complete an action. If you attend a meeting with multiple people, then that particular meeting, in which the various people are in attendance, is the context. Perhaps it's called "@weekly sales meeting".

Unless, of course, there are multiple people responsible for the completion of your one task, (maybe they are a committee, and you don't care how they complete your task, just as long as they do it), then the "@Sales Committee" might be the name of your context.

Hope this helps.

The way contexts are designed as one-to-one with tasks there is no simple way. The question GTD'ers would ask you is "Is there one person who you need for this action" If so, then you would assign it to them. You could then cmd-click on your various people contexts for the meeting to see any action that is assigned for that person. If you always work with a set team of people, and they are ALL needed, then I would make a context for that team.

However if any of the people are equally sufficient OF contexts do not handle this well. Your best bet is to use the peoples names in the note, and then use the search bar.

The multiple context discussion has been had many times - and we can all be assured that it is not going to make it in for 1.0.

I have some script tools that can manage keywords for multiple task selections. But this is still only a workaround.

[url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=5961[/url]

-P

That sounds logical, but if you defined context for individuals, can you link contexts to each others, in a sense linking the "Weekly sales meeting" with individuals part of that meeting? It seems to be something that you would want as action items out of the meeting would be actions with individuals as a context, but also with projects as a context as well. It looks like you would need to be able to set multiple contexts.
Makes sense?

[QUOTE=marchant@mac.com;28993]
Makes sense?[/QUOTE]

Yes, but I would refer you to this long thread on this topic - I doubt that there is much that can be brought up new. Like I said, the decision is most likely set in stone for 1.0.

[url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=5787[/url]

-P

Benoit, just in case you haven't discovered this, you can cmd-click to select multiple contexts. So if the same several individuals are at your regular meeting, you could cmd-click all of their individual contexts. Now save that as a Weekly Meeting perspective. Now you can easily display all the actions relevant for the people at the meeting.

How?
 

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;29037]Benoit, just in case you haven't discovered this, you can cmd-click to select multiple contexts. So if the same several individuals are at your regular meeting, you could cmd-click all of their individual contexts. Now save that as a Weekly Meeting perspective. Now you can easily display all the actions relevant for the people at the meeting.[/QUOTE]

I tried this, but it didn't work. Where are you doing the command-clicking?

I think it depends a lot on whether the action needs all the people to be together at the same time (i.e. in the same meeting) or whether it will be done with each individually.

If it needs them all together at the same time, and there is a regular and appropriate forum, then the context is sensibly that forum (e.g. "weekly sales meeting").

If it's going to require them all together but there's no regular forum then I'd assign myself an action to schedule the meeting and the actual action to "Waiting", once the meeting was scheduled I'd move the action to "Work - Meetings" with appropriate start and due dates. I do it that way or otherwise I end up with actions depending on meetings I haven't yet scheduled and no way of telling I've done something stupid :)

If the action will/can be carried out with each person separately then I think it's actually separate actions, and I'd create the full set (e.g. "Agree resourcing with Diane", "Confirm resourcing with Peter", "Get resource signoff from Ngaire") and assign them to the individual person contexts.

[QUOTE=mprewitt;30515]I tried this, but it didn't work. Where are you doing the command-clicking?[/QUOTE]

In context mode. Command-click on contexts in the sidebar. (Command-click works across almost all Mac OS applications for selecting multiple items.)