[omnibob]

I manage GTD using horizons of focus buckets:

OmniFocus for handling runway as actions, and 10k' as projects or single actions lists.

OmniOutliner handles 20k' through 50k'.

Yet I continue to struggle with a clean way to for where and how to list current, short/er term focus items. Ideally these would be neatly subsumed into horizons of focus buckets. Actions I want to do today could be flagged (in OF). But I'm (also) talking also about themes, like:

- A short term need to put extra emphasis on health / exercise / relaxation, where the theme isn't a project; it is an area of 'focus or responsibility (20k')', but I want to focus more on a small subset of my 20k' actions -- things I'm on fire about.

- Get caught up.

- Focus massively on project x.

- Focus on a subset part of a project (I suppose ideally that can be handled with flagging or manual ordering in OF).

I realize that keeping things simple, by using a smaller number of tools/methods is good. Yet I'm drawn to doing a brain dump of what's on my mind for my most important short term directions, in a single list. But the more I do that, the less effectively I think I may be using the 20k' (etc.) bucket(s).

I do a weekly review, and that is useful, but I kind of want to be able to see my current top themes quickly and easily.

I would like to see all these top-of mind things together, either as a single text blob directly, or virtually through filtering. Maybe filtering my 20k' view in OmniOutliner (with tagging or?) is the way, I don't know. My lists are too long to manually scan everything, everyday.

Ideas welcome.

[Brian]

It sounds like you're already using flagging for "do today", but use cases your examples are perfect for flagging.

I know we have a feature request open on allowing multiple colors of flags. That doesn't help you right now, but if you think that could help, emailing the support ninjas and letting them know you're interested couldn't hurt.

More immediately, twitter-style hashtags in the note field would let you pull up those items via search...

[omnibob]

Thanks, Brian. I'll see if that translates to OmniOutliner, and maybe post over in that forum, and/or mail the ninjas, since I think most of my issues lie at 20k'-50k', and I'm using OmniOutliner to park those horizons there (taking Curt's road).

I just am not sure if I'm the in an extreme minority in this matter of storage buckets and views ;)

Bob

[Lucas]

I'm not great on these runway, 20k, 50k things — I never really caught on to that part of GTD. But I think I understand you to be saying that within a particular context you have to scan through the things that you have to do for what's important. I personally handle that by putting my most important projects at the top of the project list. In context view, I order by project, and then I try to be disciplined about starting at the top of the list — and mostly succeed.

One other thing that I would say is that if two parts of the same project have two different goals or levels of importance, I usually make those separate projects. Then I can bring the important one up to the top and close it out.

[omnibob]

Originally Posted by Brian

… twitter-style hashtags in the note field would let you pull up those items via search...

Brian, I implemented hashtags, and now have a perspective 'focus' which shows only items with "#focus" in them. This is a really big improvement for my workflow, centralizing things. I am also now using hashtags as needed in my 20k'-50k' horizons of focus items as well, which I keep in OO. Thanks.

Bob

[Brian]

Glad I could help!