Contexts and Projects question
 

Hi all.

I'm a complete Omnifocus newbie but love the concept and I'm very keen to make myself more efficient/reliable!

Setting up the various contexts and projects I can understand the general principles I think. The problem is I'm not au fait with GTD!

I can see that I might make a project called "groceries" and within that use contexts for different places I shop. The problem comes with my work: my photography orders come in electronically. I then edit and send them to the lab, the lab returns the prints and I send them out to clients myself.

Would I be better to have a project called "orders" and move orders between two contexts, say "pre-lab" and "post-lab", so I can keep track of where they are in the process? Would moving orders between two projects be more correct?

I know this is basic but I want to get it right!

Many thanks in advance

Hi nicomorgan,

First I'd like to make a minor suggestion to move your grocery list to a 'single action list' rather than a project. As you cannot complete 'groceries' as it is continually being added to, in the GTD methodology, a SA list is more appropriate.

To address your main question, it depends on how different your actions are for the pre-lab or post lab elements of photography. If they are very similar, you could just have a single project and keep them in a general 'Computer' context. If you need finer visualization, I think you have it right to create two contexts. Then you can sort by context to just work on 'post-lab' work, which may be more urgent. Then you can plan out the order project as a whole, and when you check off pre-lab work, the next actions will automatically show up in post-lab without any manual work, other than defining contexts initially.

For the photography work, I would suggest perhaps thinking of each job as a standalone project. Use Curt Clifton's Populate Template Placeholders script (available [URL="http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~clifton/software.html"]here[/URL]) to flesh out each job's project as you get the order -- it allows you to fill in a template with custom information (like a mail merge program). There's good documentation with the script, but I'll include a modest example here, too:

[URL=http://img40.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture18.png][IMG]http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/7048/picture18.png[/IMG][/URL]

If I then run the script and enter values for client, jobID and due date, the script creates the following project:

[URL=http://img41.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture19.png][IMG]http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/7489/picture19.png[/IMG][/URL]

I would probably add a few more variables/placeholders and separate out some of the steps a bit more if doing this for real, but I trust this gives an idea of how my proposed scheme would work. I do something similar for filing bug reports with the makers of perennially buggy software which makes it easy to see if they've gotten around to fixing any of the bugs I've reported, or if I need to provide more information, etc.