[DrJJWMac]

Have you considered stepping outside of OF for a moment, perhaps even in a hypothetical way if not in a real way. Create a set of bins (cardboard boxes) labelled by your contexts ... preparing, cutting, sewing, finalizing, and mailing. Buy a 3x3 "sticky note" type pad (without the sticky stuff). Also buy a calendar.

When you get a phone call, pull a note pad. Put the order information on one side. On the other, in BIG BOLD LETTERS, put the due date. Drop that in to the planning bin. On your calendar, put a hash mark on the due date to indicate that you have an order due on that date.

Now start a review process. Open your planning bin. Order the notes by due date. Decide which to move forward to the cutting bin. Then, open your cutting bin. What particular change would you make here? Perhaps you should further subdivide your cutting bin in to cutting 5, cutting 6, cutting 7 ... ie, by cutting SIZES. Would that help you eliminate a step in sorting (since you would drop the note from planning directly in to its cutting size bin)?

Ooops ... someone just called to see whether a dress can be done in 5 weeks rather than your standard 6 weeks. Check your calendar. How many hash marks to you have on the day 5 weeks from now? Can you really complete 26 dresses on that day as currently required? Would one more dress really make a difference? Does your answer depend on what size the dress is ... better check the proper cutting size bins to see if it is an odd size that has only one by itself (and may therefore take longer) or can be dropped directly in a bin of 10 that are already waiting (and therefore really can be pushed ahead by the one week).

Perhaps, once you either think through or actually do this type of effort across the repeating tasks that you have, you might have a better sense of how to use OF (and iCal or other software) as your substitute set of "hardware" bins and calendar.

Otherwise, my sense is that you have a good start on the framework. I might only suggest that you create a standard template for a "dress" project.

Dress for #NAME [no context, sequential project, with start + due dates]
- cut dress #NAME [context: cutting X]
- sew dress #NAME [context: sewing]
- finalize dress #NAME [context: finalizing]
- package dress #NAME [context: packing]
- mail dress #NAME [context: mailing]

When you are ready to create the project in OF, duplicate the template. Select it and use the find/replace method to change #NAME to the person's name. Viola -- a custom project ready for your workflow. BTW, set the review period on the template project to be something standard like weekly. This way, every days review should bring forward the projects that were started on that time slice in the past.

Others may have some ideas for custom perspectives to help you with the overview.

Hope this gives you some ideas to help.

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JJW