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Waiting for and People Contexts Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I have a waiting for context then I then sometimes further break down into people - e.g., Waiting: Person's Name. I also have a context for people I speak to frequently, e.g., People: Person's Name. Here's my problem. If I am speaking to that person, I would like to be able to pull up everything for that person, including "waiting for" items - is there a way to do this or do I just have to check both lists?

Thanks!
 
You could check both lists. You could make perspectives that show you both lists. Or, you could combine the two lists, and put start dates (and possibly due dates) on the waiting items. If you are waiting for Fred to give you a report, put "Receive XYZ report from Fred" on your People:Fred list, with a due date showing the date that you need the report, and a start date reflecting when you might reasonably first get the report. If it is a sequential project, the incomplete action will prevent OmniFocus from offering you anything past the awaited item as an available action.
 
The most efficient way may be to create a perspective for all people or certain groups of people that will show both contexts (make sure your view settings are correct).
 
@sworks, the problem is that you cannot assign two contexts to the same tasks. The only working solution I have seen over the years of begging to have a way to associate more than one "tag" with a task (be in multiple contexts or just user defined meta tags, or just tags for the love of god - something that everyone else but OmniGroup seem to do) is to use a convention for what constitutes a tag and then create a perspective based on a search for the tag and the associated context.

For example, you could chose to tag all people with $, so whenever you have a task that involves Tom you write $Tom (not strictly necessary, but I feel it would preclude confusion).

You can then go to the Contexts view and do a search on $Tom. This will return all tasks that have $Tom in the task title or text. If you group that view by Contexts, and you happen to have a WaitingFor context, you will see all the tasks you are waiting on Tom for. Save the search result as a Tom Perspective and there you are. If you assign a lot of stuff to Tom, you could do what is suggested above, and before saving, click on the WaitingOn Context, so you show only the tasks that you are waiting for on Tom (versus any other task that relates to Tom in other perspectives). Then simply save it as a "Waiting on Tom" Perspective.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by imlad View Post
@sworks, the problem is that you cannot assign two contexts to the same tasks. The only working solution I have seen over the years of begging to have a way to associate more than one "tag" with a task (be in multiple contexts or just user defined meta tags, or just tags for the love of god - something that everyone else but OmniGroup seem to do) is to use a convention for what constitutes a tag and then create a perspective based on a search for the tag and the associated context.
What sworks is proposing, I think, is making a perspective that includes Waiting For:imlad, People:imlad, and whatever other *:imlad contexts one might have. Obviously, this gets unwieldy if you have too many such perspectives. That's one of the reasons I like having just one context tree to hold all of this — no perspectives needed! I do still have a Waiting context tree, but it doesn't have people in it. I don't find that I need an easy way to find all of the tasks where I'm waiting on any person to do something; the review process (and due dates on those tasks, where appropriate) keeps me aware of them. Being able to pull up that list is the only benefit I've ever seen to organizing in that fashion, and for me, it isn't worth it.
 
 


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