Clients as projects
 

I am a Newbie to OF and want to use it to follow clients (actually patients) so that I can know what needs to be done for them and schedule actions, alerts and reviews. I don't know how best to organise this and wonder if calling each client a project (I'd end up with hundreds of projects) would work. Has anyone experience of this or indicate whether I'm going aqt this in the wrong way?
Thank you

I prefer using important customers as hierarchy contexts:
*customers
*customers : custA
*customers : custA : Person1
*customers : custA : WaitPerson1

For less-important customers, I start the task with customers' name and/or person >
e.g. Task subject reads > custA/Person1: planning meeting

Yet there are MANY possible ways to get into going.
Try starting with putting in ONLY a few Cust & tasks for testing so ;)

I've used folders before for customers. I haven't found a perfect setup for this yet.

It can definitely be useful to make a folder to hold the projects associated with a given customer - that lets you create and complete individual projects as needed, rather than having one perpetually uncompleted project sitting in your sidebar.

Marcus' suggestion of a context hierarchy can also be helpful - group the folks you'll be working with under a parent context. You can then assign tasks to individuals or the group as a whole as needed.

Hope this helps!

[QUOTE=Tuly Rosenfeld;86608]I am a Newbie to OF and want to use it to follow clients (actually patients) so that I can know what needs to be done for them and schedule actions, alerts and reviews. I don't know how best to organise this and wonder if calling each client a project (I'd end up with hundreds of projects) would work. Has anyone experience of this or indicate whether I'm going aqt this in the wrong way?
Thank you[/QUOTE]

Hi Tuly,

I would consider using projects. My personal setup involves projects for patients I see very regularly, and a general single-action list for patients that may not be my own but for whom I need to do something.
The way this works for me is that I find the sequential project is a neat way to focus, quite literally, on what you need to do next for a patient. In my own experience, I found very few situations when there was a need for anything other than a sequential project when dealing with patients, but that may be a bias of the type of practices I've worked with.
The single-action list, however, allows me to prioritize differently and manage as I wish actions that need to be done for people I don't deal with on a very regular basis.
I think you'll find that both GTD and OF are particularly adept at dealing with clinical situations (in my experience, and I believe in that of quite a few other folks-there are some discussions over at the DACo forums if you haven't seen them yet).
A final note, though: I don't know how paranoid you are, but I tend to be quite a bit, so I never use patients' names or any other identifying info in OF. Depending on whether or not you synchronize, etc., YMMV.

Good luck!