Thread: Things Setup
View Single Post
greetings,

i'm new here...

i've struggled with trying to figure out how to use OF... i bought OF when version 1.0 came out earlier in the year to help me keep track of things at my job. but i haven't had the time to figure it out...

last night, i ran across "things" on versiontracker and tried it today... after viewing their mpeg tutorials and experimenting with "things", i'm starting to understand OF a little better... i figured out how to set up some projects and tasks in "things" that made sense to me. then i've replicated it in OF...

since then, i've spent today reading thru the forum to try to understand how to use OF...

the "today" features of "things" and also "chandler" are very intuitive to me... but i don't understand how to be able to set up that kind of view in OF... i'm under the impression that the "due" button in the toolbar will do something similar after i get more info and dates in the tasks, yes?

the other thing that i'm struggling with in OF, is the context... at first i thought that "tags" in "things" were the counterpart to OF "context". but it seems to me that "areas" in "things" is a better counterpart to "context". i read a thread in this forum about contexts from about a year ago which has helped... i'll keep researching that in the other threads, and not distract this thread... i'm not sure about where the counterpart for "tags" or "notes" in "things" are in OF yet...

anyway, i was surprised and interested to see this thread about "things" here... i've been able to figure out "things" much easier than OF so far... (i mean no put down for OF, just a comment that "things" has been easier and more intuitive for me as a beginner...) i might end up using "things" for a while to learn better how to use gtd, then transfer to OF when i need more features... unfortunately, the workload at my job is usually quite overwhelming and doesn't afford much time for things beyond the day to day activities, such as learning new software... it's a case of the tyranny of the urgent outweighing the important... the common way everyone describes how things happen at work is that each task, activity, or deadline gets overcome by the other tasks, deadlines, and events... but i digress...

my current method for some years has been to keep a simple text based "to-do" list with each of the activities i work on... then i just keep track of which project or activity i have to work on in my head based upon deadlines... while this has worked reasonably well for projects, when i work on them myself, it doesn't work well for the random tasks unrelated to a larger project or working with groups of people are group projects... also, somethings that gets put on the back burner can get lost when it doesn't have a "deadline" per se... i tried using apples, ical and mail "to do" list for the random things for a short while... that did not work at all for me... i'm hoping that one of these gtd tools will help me triage the work better and be more productive...

anyway, thanks for this tread...