Thread: Fear of OF/GTD
View Single Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by Don1 View Post
That being said, I have set up project folders for each "department. Potentially, this might be the incorrect way of setting OF up. I read some threads and maybe these should be contexts. That worries me because I cannot relegate an action to more than one context. Again, perhaps I am not setting things up correctly. Example: I need to go to the post office to mail invoices but I also need to go to the post office to mail proposals. This would be two entries (not efficient) for the same errand.
In my opinion, you should not worry about the fact that you might have multiple "take XYZ to post office for mailing" actions active at once. If you set the context for those actions to something like Errands:Post Office, OF allows you to easily view all of the actions you might take in a given context, such as a trip to the Post Office. Those actions have nothing to do with each other except that you accomplish them all in the same place, so trying to somehow combine them into one is not the way to go. If you did somehow manage to do so (perhaps a daily "Take daily outgoing materials to Post Office" action) you would still need some means of tracking all the different items that should be handled in that task, and you've lost the accountability from any given project for the materials being handled properly. If you forget to take the proposals on the trip to the Post Office, you've still got the incomplete action there to remind you that it hasn't been done in my scheme, but in the "Take daily outgoing materials to the Post Office" scheme you've lost track. You can't look at a project and know with any confidence that you took that document to be mailed

Quote:
Another example: I need to talk to a client about a job we are working on but I also need to talk to the clients accounts payable department about a past due invoice.
Again, I would decompose this into multiple tasks to be tracked separately. A good model is to consider how you would keep track of the things to be done if you had some people you could delegate the work to. If you had your accounting department call the A/P department, and your creative genius talk to theirs, with a little bit of success hopefully those two roles will be filled by different people, right?