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Help wanted: Using OF as a vacation planner Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Newbie user question. I'm making good progress at getting most work and personal items organized in OF, but I'd also like to be able to use it to plan an upcoming Disney World vacation. The idea is to put in attractions, shows, etc. as actions, check them off as they're done, and have a constantly updated list of possible next-things-to-do. The iPhone 'Nearby' view should be excellent for helping identify attractions in whatever park I'm currently located in.

I've run into several challenges that I haven't yet encountered using OF for other tasks. Any suggestions welcome (perhaps some of these will turn into feature requests if no good workarounds are suggested).

Item 1: Low-priority items. I don't expect to do everything there is to do, but I'd like to include many 'if time permits' items. There doesn't seem to be any prioritization available other than flagged / unflagged. So I'll probably just order items from most important to least, but it would be nice to have a way to flag priorities.

Item 2: Hiding contexts. I plan to assign contexts to items based on location -- Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Downtown Disney, etc. But as soon as I create these, they now show up any time I'm trying to assign a context to work items, etc. Yes, I could just ignore them, but I'd really like to filter them out. I don't see a way to do this with perspectives. Is there some way to take a group of actions, projects, and contexts and completely remove them from any view until I'm ready to work on them? It seems like 'Focus' lets me hide particular projects, but not contexts that are only needed for those projects. Perhaps the idea of having contexts scoped only to a particular project is not the GTD or OF way, but that's what I'd ideally like to have.

It seems like perspectives, focus, 'on hold', all are partial answers, I just haven't yet found a combination that looks like it really puts all the 'vacation planning mode' things out of sight except when I'm working on them.

Item 3: Project reuse. This is a trip I do regularly (every 1 or 2 years), so after the vacation is done, items all checked off, I'd like to be able to resurrect it in a clean state somewhere down the road when it's time to do it again. It would be nice to have a 'project template' that can be imported at will, modified as needed, and then ready to go.

Item 4: Multiple start or end times. There might be a show I want to see that's showing 4 or 5 times daily. I put the idea of an 'OR action' in another thread, but maybe there is a different way to handle this. If there is a movie showing at 1, 3:30, and 6:15, actions for all 3 could be entered with appropriate times. But the intention isn't to see it 3 times, but just to have 3 different options for when to do the task. Is there a good way to set this up with current capabilities?

Thanks for any pointers or suggestions.

Mike
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey View Post
Item 2: Hiding contexts. I plan to assign contexts to items based on location -- Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Downtown Disney, etc. But as soon as I create these, they now show up any time I'm trying to assign a context to work items, etc. Yes, I could just ignore them, but I'd really like to filter them out. I don't see a way to do this with perspectives. Is there some way to take a group of actions, projects, and contexts and completely remove them from any view until I'm ready to work on them? It seems like 'Focus' lets me hide particular projects, but not contexts that are only needed for those projects. Perhaps the idea of having contexts scoped only to a particular project is not the GTD or OF way, but that's what I'd ideally like to have.
Contexts can be set as Dropped or On-Hold. (I think "Suspended" would be a better word than Dropped.) You can create a Disney parent context, then put the others under it. I quick right-click lets you switch the parent context between Active and Dropped. When dropped, I think this will hide the parent and child contexts from normal lists.

Quote:
Item 3: Project reuse. This is a trip I do regularly (every 1 or 2 years), so after the vacation is done, items all checked off, I'd like to be able to resurrect it in a clean state somewhere down the road when it's time to do it again. It would be nice to have a 'project template' that can be imported at will, modified as needed, and then ready to go.
Built-in template support is something OG has talked about. Until then, you might try my Populate Template Placeholders script.
__________________
Cheers,

Curt
 
Thanks Curt -- it looks like 'Dropped' does what I want (the contexts disappear from the drop-down lists). I also stumbled across the Help menu's 'Add Welcome Template' function, so it's clear that there is a mechanism that could be extended to general template support if Omni decides to do so (I'd vote yes!)

Thanks again for the helpful response
Mike
 
 


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