[Pags]

I'm a litigator and I've also been using OF since the beta. Here's how I use OF in my own law practice:

I use projects the same way LawDaddy does. Project/task management fits my cases like a glove. I'm tinkering with sub-projects for different portions of each case, like a project for discovery and another for fact investigation, but so far that's more trouble than it's worth and I haven't figured out a good way to implement it yet. I use contexts in much the same was as LawDaddy--instead of @phone etc., my contexts are task-types that occur frequently in my work, such as calls, letters, review/analyze, prepare for, etc. I also do a fair amount of drafting, and for my "drafting" context, I've created three sub-contexts for short, medium, and long drafting tasks. I also have a "delegate" context, with three sub-contexts for my secretary, my paralegal, and my associate.

Like an earlier poster, I'm also finding that, as I capture things more quickly and efficiently into OF, I'm keeping fewer stacks of paper with post-its on my desk as external reminders of things I need to do. This is especially nice since I'm a clean desk fan who hates loose papers. Now I put things in the file where they belong, and I pull out the files as I need to work on them based on how OF helps me stay organized.

I've recently refined my OF system a little bit regarding priority and timing (which are not strengths of OF or GTD in my opinion, but I don't need to pick that fight here . . .) I'm finding that OF is best used as my weekly manager, rather than a daily to-do list tool, and that I use a simpler to-do list each day that includes those things I need to get done on a given day. Usually that's an all-day event in Outlook (the Windows desktop sits next to the MBAir on my desk) in which I track the day's tasks in the notes section.

Hope this is informative, and I'd love to hear ideas to improve how I'm doing things.