[eppentorf]

Hello, new Omnifocus user here.

Assume the following situation: I am team leader, working on a new car design. Therefore I need input from all my team members (e.g. safety engineer, interior design, market research etc.). I usually send those requests per email, a lot of them every day.

How do I keep track of that in OmniFocus? So far, I'm using my mail program for that:

Let's say I need to know if red cars will still be bought in 10 years. So I send an email to market research and drag my sent email into a folder called 'await reply'. That reminds me of two things, that I did already send it and that the reply is outstanding.

If I want to transfer this to omnifocus:

1) I write the email
2) I need to create a task in omnifocus 'write email to market research'
3) I mark as completed (as I already did that)
4) and create another task 'Follow up with market research' (start date in 1 week)

That is great since the follow up task will show up in my task list at the time I have to follow up. However, the system has two flaws: steps 2+3 are redundant, because I did already send the email. And my task list will explode with follow ups.

How do you handle email follow up on emails with Omnifocus? There must be a more elegant way.

Thanks,

Alex

[whpalmer4]

So why not just do steps 1 and 4? Presumably you keep a copy of your sent email automatically, so you've got a record of sending it already.

[Gardener]

I agree that there's no need for steps 2 and 3.

I would want the followups in my action list; I'd just give them a context of Followup so it's easy to filter them out, plus the Start Date would naturally filter them out.

But if you don't want your followups in your task list, you could have a list of followups, maybe in OmniOutliner or just Excel, sortable by followup date. Then OmniFocus or some sort of daily checklist could have an action "Check followup list and email due or overdue followups."

Of course, that external list isn't all that different from your Outlook folder, except that it's sortable by followup date, which seems to have value.

Gardener

[GeoffAirey]

I use Outlook and Flag the email to be sent to be followed up (flag) at a later date. At the beginning of each day, I go through my follow up list (My Follow up inbox) and if they still require further action, I either follow up, or make a note for an action in OF.

Unless you need to put an action in to OF for a project review, I see little point in having two reminders for the same thing.

[smarsh]

I find the AppleScript at the following link pretty awesome for cutting out the extra work of manually creating follow up actions in Omnifocus after sending an email in Mail: http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=12810