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Originally Posted by JohnJ80
well, one big reason for tags is that I have quite a few subordinates and several of them can be assigned an action. One context really doesn't cut it if one has to run a large organization.
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I have a hierarchy of contexts that essentially replicate Omni's org chart. A top level "Omni" context contains ones for each department within the company. A few important external relationships appear here, as well. ("Lawyers", for example.)
Each person here has a context within one of those department-contexts. I do not create multiple buckets for folks that have split responsibilities; needing to sort between multiple contexts for the same person was too much work for too little benefit. For me, it was more important to be able to quickly assign a task to Bob than it was to differentiate between "Bob-as-QA" vs "Bob-as-Website guy".
Working within that structure, here's how I handle various tasks:
- Actions assigned to a specific person get assigned to their context.
- Actions which require an entire team get assigned to the context that represents that group. (These tend to be "Ask team about X" or "Tell team about Y" sorts of actions; I bring the context up my meetings with those groups.)
- Actions that can be assigned to any member of a team also get assigned to the group context. This is usually (but not always) temporary. See below for more detail.
Okay, those are the easy ones to handle. What to do when things are fuzzier?
When an action is assigned to a subset of a given team which isn't likely to repeat, I don't make a context for that combination of people. I assign the action to one point person, mentioning the other person/people in the title or note. (An action where Alice was point person ends up in her context, titled "Work with Bob on thingy", in other words.)
The approach above allows me to use my contexts and the search tool to create/assign/find actions quickly, and to avoid dropping stuff on the floor.
The main drawback I've identified is the longer action titles and additional typing required. I can see how some sort of autocomplete like we have for projects and contexts would be an improvement.
(Taking this all one step further, I've heard of folks extending the twitter hashtag concept to OmniFocus, adding something like #mustdo to actions they want to be able to search for later.)
Like I said before - this is just what works for me, but I hope it helps; if you have more questions or see problems with this approach, let me know!
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