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Looking for Some Daily Perspectives Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Would anyone care to share their favorite Perspectives, the ones you find yourself leaving open for hours on your desktop?

Here's my situation. I'm a housewife and mom, with a small internet business, a couple of volunteer things, and a couple of serious hobbies. [And a sleep deficit :-) ] I need a Perspective I can keep open on my Desktop all the time that shows the things I need to get done now, and for the next few days. My current "Little To-Do List" isn't cutting it. [Context Mode, All contexts, group by Due Date, sort by Project, Due Soon (4 days) Actions, Any time, any flag.]

I have about a gazillion actions that can be started any time, but don't really have due dates ... nobody, even me, cares when I clean the radiators. But things like this have to get done eventually, so I need a way to get these onto my list. [Maybe a flag during a review?]

Other tasks have clear due dates, or I can assign an arbitrary due date (son's hair cut).

If I could make a Perspective based on multiple criteria, say display everything Due Soon OR everything flagged, I'd do that ... but the perspectives work as an exclusive AND. [Computer folk will understand.] I really don't want to go through flagging everything; I'm not into the weekly review habit yet.

So maybe by seeing what works for other people, I can adjust my basic perspective to show what I want it to.
 
I've been experimenting with giving all my active projects soft due dates.

During my weekly review, I set the group projects by filter to Due.

This will group the projects I am looking at into due date clumps.

I've created three folders in my home folder:
Maintenance (projects and actions to keep the system running)
Single Actions (full of projects with the same name as their default contexts)
Projects (Active projects I'm working on).

I only make projects due that are in the projects folders. The above folder structure allows me to select the projects folder, group by due date, and make sure all my projects have a due date.

I'm still tinkering with it. So far, I've found projects with due dates tend to get done. The problem for me is learning how to space the projects out enough so that I don't get clobbered with due items. :-) But if I do, I can always change the projects due date.

The other problem I'm working through is how to make items that really need to get done now stand out.
 
I've found that looking at stuff in different ways back to back can be useful. By that, I mean cycling through a few key Perspectives, which I think you've already started to identify.

I'd highly recommend setting 'Next Review' dates (I set mine on the day of the week I do my weekly review), *and*, set Project 'Review every' cycles to something longer than '1 week' for things that don't require that short of an interval. Then you'll be able to focus more carefully on a shorter list of things every week. However, I'm in the same boat as you with those huge Single Action lists. I'm considering breaking those up, so that things that are approaching, but not quite, 'someday/maybe' status get reviewed every month or so. OTOH, too much process detail can get in the way. Curt Clifton has posted some really useful Perspective info in this forum. http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...hlight=clifton

Back to cycling Perspectives: I process my Next Review Perspective until I'm caught up (during weekly review), then review a Due Soon Perspective, then a flagged Perspective. Still a work in progress, but what I have observed is that I feel much more confident I'm staying aware of stuff, and also that viewing information in different ways makes me think more. I.e., if you keep reviewing the same one Perspective, you can start to go numb seeing a long list of single actions in the same order over and over. Sometimes I'll key in some semi-random term in Search and see what comes up. It can be inspiring, and filters out other stuff momentarily.

Bob
 
 


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