[invictus26]

The David Allen Company puts out a great podcast where David and some of the other coaches talk about different GTD topics. The latest one is called "Best Practices of Doing" and dealt with how to best choose an item from your task lists and get working.

One of the coaches mentioned that you can use a daily "Hot List" of actions to make your lists easier to deal with. He described it as the few things you would get done "if today was going to be wildly successful". As they talked about the Hot List, I thought that it would be a perfect use of Flags in OmniFocus. I've always used Flags to create a sort of "Today" view, but felt guilty because I thought David would say I should only have my context lists. I think the idea of Flagging actions for today is a great way to focus your workflow.

I wrote up a more in-depth look at the Hot List here, and you can find the podcast here (opens in iTunes). What do you guys think of this usage of Flags?

[Greg Jones]

That's exactly what I have been doing as well. In my daily review I scan all my projects, also keeping in mind any shift in the contexts that will be available to me during the day. That is, I might have flagged two tasks yesterday under 'Read and Review' that I might want to work through as I had a doctor's appointment and time available in the waiting room. I might have checked one of the tasks off yesterday, but today I will remove the flag from the uncompleted item as it is now of lower 'priority' since I don't have that otherwise dead time available. Today I might add flags to 2-3 low priority phone calls that I can make while waiting to pick my daughter up from her tennis match. If I get one of the calls made, I'll remove the flag from the remaining calls, or not if I decide that I really should make the calls.

The above-mentioned examples of tasks that can float on/off my 'hot list', combined with tasks that stay flagged until completed + tasks with firm due dates is working very well for me. GTD compliant or not, it's a very low-drag, productive way for me to stay on top of the not urgent, yet still important (think Covey quadrants) tasks that I should be doing.

[Mango Himself]

Excellent idea. I noticed I was flagging some random actionsand they would just stay there since I work mostly with contexts. Applying the concept of flagging only those actions I must do today is a nice concept.