[jbursztyn]

Omni Team, and Other expert Users:

Delegation and Followup is an integral part of my life. I usally do most of it via e-mail (entourage because of Exchange) I really feel that some scripts work great on following up (sending email) and creating tasks into OF.

I know GTD is the fundation of OF but not its sole intent. I will love to understand how people are using OF for delegation, and follow up.

thanks

[jbursztyn]

I supervise 18 people in 6 countries, and delegation and followup is crucial for me. I have not found a way to do this efficiently in OF . I have been using TR as a tool for two reasons, Delegation and Followup, and PocketMod Printing. TR lacks a lot of things and I want to move on to OF.

I have read many porst on this subject and I understand that OF is not only a GTD tool. My question is simple: can anyone help me on how to manage delegation and followup with OF? can anyone share their methodology? I would like to know details, for example, what you use each field for, start date, due date ,and review date, what contexts do you use and how you set up filters. Also how you differentiate followup from waiting for something from that person.

Here is what I do so that you understand my situation.

1- I do most of my communication through email (entourage), that includes task delegation, and followups.
2- I need to be able to have a clean and uncluttered list of tasks. (no future followups showing)
3- with some sort of filter, I need to be able to see what I have assigned to a person even though the followup date is in the future.
4- with a filter I need to be able to see things I need to followup on tomorrow, next week, today, and overdue.

all your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

thanks

Jack

[dhm2006]

Originally Posted by jbursztyn

My question is simple: can anyone help me on how to manage delegation and followup with OF? can anyone share their methodology? I would like to know details, for example,

what you use each field for, start date, due date, and review date,
what contexts do you use and how you set up filters.
Also how you differentiate followup from waiting for something from that person.
...
2- I need to be able to have a clean and uncluttered list of tasks. (no future followups showing)
3- with some sort of filter, I need to be able to see what I have assigned to a person even though the followup date is in the future.
4- with a filter I need to be able to see things I need to followup on tomorrow, next week, today, and overdue.

Since no-one else answered, I will share a few things. Unfortunately, I don't delegate much, so I don't treat delegation any differently from waiting for.

Work in context view to manipulate the actions; in planning view, the view bar settings work at the project level, not the action level. First, set the followup date. If you want to limit your followup date to one day, put the same date in both start date and due date. If it is a longer time range, put the earliest date in start date and the latest date in due date.

To get a clean and uncluttered list of actions with no future followups showing, put a start date in the future for the actions to be hidden and set the filter to available. Anything with a future start date will be hidden when the filter is set to available.

To see what you have assigned to a person even though the followup date (start date) is in the future, change the filter to remaining. Anything not completed will show up when the filter is set to remaining.

To see things you need to followup on tomorrow, next week, today, and overdue, set the view bar to *group* by due date, *sort* by due date, *filter* by either available to hide actions with future start dates OR remaining to see everything not completed, *filter* by any time, and *filter* by all regardless of the flag setting. The date you put in the due date field determines what group the action is in. You can group by start date instead if you prefer. Also, you might want to try sorting by something else. You will still get the groupings you want (tomorrow, next week, today, overdue, etc.) but the order of the actions within each group will change.

As for what contexts to use, you could create a context called "agendas" with sub-contexts for each person. What you see in the outline in context view is limited to the context(s) you select in the sidebar. If you want to see the actions for just one person, select that person's context. If you want to see the actions for all of the people, select agendas. If you want to see something in between, you can Cmd-select multiple non-adjacent contexts at the same time.

I don't use the review feature, but if you search the forum for "review", you will probably find several threads on topic. I do know you have to be in planning view to use the review date. You cannot filter by review date, but you can group and sort by it. And there is a toolbar button to mark items reviewed, which sets a new review date in the future at the interval you set.

I hope that helps. Maybe someone who has the same work structure that you do will refine my comments.

[jbursztyn]

Thanks for the reply, any more OF users want to share on their methodology

[Lutin]

Originally Posted by jbursztyn

Also how you differentiate followup from waiting for something from that person.

I don't. I have a Waiting For context for stuff I've delegated.

I have an agenda context, for stuff I need to discuss with concerned people without delegating to them (very useful when you meet someone unexpectedly).

This two contexts are subclassed to quickly access to the key people:
WFor
WFor Bob
WFor Alice
Wfor Joe
Agenda
Agenda Bob
Agenda Alice
Agenda Joe

Regularly, I review the tasks in WFor (part of my weekly review), and send the follow-up required.


If I know a task I'm waiting for won't be done before a week, I set the start date in 6 days, so I'm not bugged with it until its time. This way, the task won't be shown with the filter available, but I can still look at it with the filter remaining.

I use Mail.app, MailTags and Curt's scripts to navigate between Mail and OmniFocus. I also use MailActOn to trigger Curt's scripts.

I hope that helps.
Do you have any other question?

[Paul]

Hi Jack --

You may want to look at iNIk.net, where Nik wrote a four-part series on adapting Entourage to fully implement GTD. I don't know entourage, so I can't evaluate what he's done, but I do know the work he did on kGTD extra functionality was first-rate. Maybe you can handle your situation within an augmented Entourage.

I don't think plain-vanilla GTD (or the current OmniF) has a good answer for tracking delegations with so many people. I adapted kGTD to solve a similar situation by adding metadata for Who the task is related to. I then could print out a list for each person of all the remaining tasks related to that person (and groups that they belonged to), sorted by context (or project).

This gave me, in effect, an agenda for each person while leaving the various tasks in different contexts. This is important to me because I have who are sometimes in 5 or 6 indepepndent roles in my life, so we have delegations and followups going both ways.

I hope that OmniF will let me add and sort by the information that is relevant to me.

[jbursztyn]

Originally Posted by Lutin

I don't. I have a Waiting For context for stuff I've delegated.

I have an agenda context, for stuff I need to discuss with concerned people without delegating to them (very useful when you meet someone unexpectedly).

This two contexts are subclassed to quickly access to the key people:
WFor
WFor Bob
WFor Alice
Wfor Joe
Agenda
Agenda Bob
Agenda Alice
Agenda Joe

Regularly, I review the tasks in WFor (part of my weekly review), and send the follow-up required.


If I know a task I'm waiting for won't be done before a week, I set the start date in 6 days, so I'm not bugged with it until its time. This way, the task won't be shown with the filter available, but I can still look at it with the filter remaining.

I use Mail.app, MailTags and Curt's scripts to navigate between Mail and OmniFocus. I also use MailActOn to trigger Curt's scripts.

I hope that helps.
Do you have any other question?

thanks for your reply, I understand what you are doing with the agenda and waiting for, but how cqan you filter to view all of bob's actions (waiting for and Agenda)

[Craig]

Originally Posted by jbursztyn

thanks for your reply, I understand what you are doing with the agenda and waiting for, but how cqan you filter to view all of bob's actions (waiting for and Agenda)

You can select multiple contexts by Cmd-clicking them. (Perspectives will save those selections, too.)

[policarpo]

Over the past month I've been looking for a solution to Delegate tasks to my team. I've looked at online solutions, but in the end, I had to keep everything locked down, so this map illustrates how we solved our particular needs.

Anyhoo, here's the Process Flow Map


Here's how it currently flows:

Process:
. At the beginning of each week I review my InBox and begin the delegation process
. I Print to .PDF an overview of our week schedule and submit this to my PM's and Director and my Team.
. I push out Teammate Tagged Tasks to the team (I have a CONTEXT for each of us and sync over just our respective tasks via the iCal sync Tab)
. We use Anxiety to review our tasks
. If we need to comment or add notes, we do so in iCal via the ToDo Panel (or I update Notes in OmniFocus since I manage the db)
. When a task is complete we check it off in Anxiety
. I review our progress and update accordingly

Setup
. iMac running BusySync and iCal
. Individual Calendars in iCal for each Teammate
. Our respective calendars are password protected and are loaded into our local iCal

My ultimate wish is to have us all on OmniFocus doing the above process and bypassing the BusySync and iCal setup altogether.

Oh well, until then, it seems to be working...wish us luck. :)

If anyone has a similar setup or advice, I'd love to hear your experience.

Wish us luck! Let me know if anything in this setup will cause us problems down the line. :)


Many thanks,
-policarpo

Back to GTD2CYA

[policarpo]

Well, FWIW, almost a month into this and everything seems to be functioning properly.