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Is this a flaw in Omnifocus? Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I've recently purchased and I'm attempting to build a sustainable hierachy of Folders/Projects/Actions.

The natural order to me would seem e.g. "Work"/"Personal" (Folders), "Legal"/"Marketing"/"Household" (Projects), "Individual tasks" (Actions)

On the surface this is good, as I would wish to be able to quickly assign tasks to each of the stated projects. On the other hand, these projects are all intended to remain there in perpetuity, i.e. Even if there are no tasks attached to "Legal" for now, I would want it to remain as there surely will be in the future - but this goes against their status as "Projects," i.e. Something to be completed. I would also not wish to "complete" one of them by accident.

If I choose the alternative route and make them each folders, then I lose the ability to assign things to them, as you can only assign to Projects and Contexts...

Is there a "best practice" here?
 
I have each "bucket" that you mentioned (Work, Personal, Legal, Marketing, etc). set up as a folder. I consider these to be equivalent to "Areas of Focus"/20,000 ft level in classic GTD terminology.

I get around what you mentioned as an inability to assign tasks to folders by having a Single Action List in EACH folder (i.e., inside Legal would be a Single Action List called "Single Tasks - Legal"), then any individual action that is not a part of a project simply gets put into the appropriate Single Action List within the folder.
 
I settled on using high level Folders for Roles which will persists. For example:
folder Homeowner with a project Chores but also a folder for Car Owner with its own projects. Similarly a folder for Worker has folders for different roles on the job. You might have:
folder Worker
subfolder Marketer
for example.

I gave up on the Person folder and broke it down into several folders such as Pet Owner, Partner, Friend, Parent, Volunteer, etc.

I found this idea on these forums a few years ago and it has worked well since. The naming convention aligns with the idea of naming projects as goals with which can be completed and using verbs such as Register Car.

I do still use lower levels folders to group projects for planning and review purposes which may or may not correspond to a role. I have a few Single Action projects scattered in the hierarchy but they mostly serve a reminder to consider if the task is really not part of something more complex. The ones that have persisted are the on-hold Someday Maybe project and a Quickies project for all the really little things I need to do under the folder/role Boat Owner. Single Action lists do serve to keep tasks from being recast as projects when just grouped in a folder but I think of them as the kitchen junk drawer and really try not to use them but sometimes you just have to throw that thing you are holding somewhere.

Last edited by pjb; 2012-08-11 at 07:43 AM..
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by SFF View Post
I have each "bucket" that you mentioned (Work, Personal, Legal, Marketing, etc). set up as a folder. I consider these to be equivalent to "Areas of Focus"/20,000 ft level in classic GTD terminology.

I get around what you mentioned as an inability to assign tasks to folders by having a Single Action List in EACH folder (i.e., inside Legal would be a Single Action List called "Single Tasks - Legal"), then any individual action that is not a part of a project simply gets put into the appropriate Single Action List within the folder.
This is exactly how I manage my tasks, although at the very highest level I have Work, Home and Personal folders (I found I needed to separate Home and Personal as tasks in Personal were distinct to me and could cross into Work or Home without actually belonging to either - things like self-study or reading lists or running back-ups on my MacBook which is used for both work and personal stuff).

Then I have folders beneath that for each "Area of Focus" containing projects and at least one Single Action List per folder. Some of these lists do indeed remain empty occasionally, but I still feel they're important to the structure. If they go unused for a considerable length of time then I remove them. I'm not rigid with my approach though - if an area of focus is persistent and will only ever require a single action list then I'm happy for that to exist outside of a second level folder.

Last edited by pmdf; 2012-08-13 at 03:56 AM..
 
Thanks, SFF - sorry for the late reply. This was extremely helpful, so thank you for taking the time. I'm going to copy you exactly :)
 
Thank you as well.
 
 


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