[alexius]

Hi all,

What I would love is to be able to check off an action such as "e-mail betty re: shipping" and then automatically have a new task (with the same description) created in a "waiting for" context. The idea is I don't forget that I want to hear back from her.

It's important for my own accounting purposes that I can record this as 'sent' (so I can't simply change the contexts).

Any suggestions for a workflow?

[whpalmer4]

You could simply duplicate the task before checking it off as complete, then change the context in the duplicate to your "Waiting For" context. Click on the little dot to the left of the action name to select it, cmd-D to duplicate, change the context. Not automatic, but easy.

[curt.clifton]

How 'bout a script based solution? A Complete and Wait For Response script could duplicate the item, check-off the original, and assign the duplicate to the waiting for context, perhaps with an optional future start date. You could add this to the toolbar for easy mousing.

I might be persuaded to bang this together if I thought someone would find it useful. (No promises; this weekend is booked solid and next week is looking scary.)

(In my ideal world, I would be able to write a script that is automatically executed whenever an item is checked off. Then I could check whether the completed action is in a particular context, say Email, and automatically create a related Waiting For item. Perhaps in OmniFocus 3.0.)

[watchit]

That would be great, Curt. I find myself manually duplicating actions for follow ups all the time. tia.

[ext555]

Curt, when you get time : ) I'm sure a lot of people would find it useful .
I know lots of times , in a rush I forget to create follow up WF's ..

[CorgiGirl]

Hi Alexius

I was having the same issue. Duplicating for me seemed a little counter-intuitive so I ended up using the FLAG to indicate "waiting" vs. priority. Works very well, is a quick fix, and avoids a case of Michael Keaton's movie Multiplicity in my database ;)

[curt.clifton]

I found some time to bang this script together. You can download it from my software page. Here's the marketing blurb:

This script marks the selected action as complete and creates a new action, like the selected one but prefixed with "Reply on:" and placed in your Waiting For context. Great for email and other actions where you expect a reply.

You can change the prefix to your liking by opening the script in Script Editor. You can also tweak the name of your waiting for context if the script doesn't guess correctly. (It looks for the first context with the letters w-a-i-t in it.)

This has had very limited testing—much less than I usually like—but there seemed to be demand, and I didn't want folks to wait too long. I don't think the script could do much damage even if it has a weird bug.

Share and enjoy!

[ext555]

thanks curt! I'll try it out today

[alexius]

This is great! Thanks for all the responses and especially to Curt for the script! I will let you know how it works out for me.

Thanks again!

Alex

[gcrump]

Curt,

Awesome stuff! Thanks.

George