greetings,
i'm new to OF... i have a few simple questions and then a more involved conundrum...
my simple questions are:
1- i've noticed that people put "@" in their contexts, like "@work", "@computer", or something... is the "@" a special character for OF that makes it do something or interpret the item differently? sometimes the posts have "*" or "..." too in the contexts. are those just fillers for posting or are they also some kind of special characters for OF? or are these just use for alignment or some other visual appeal? i didn't find anything in the help about this yet...
2- in projects mode, OF shows either series or parallel icons for the project in the content pane... but the inspector pane has a 3rd symbol for projects besides the series/parallel that looks like a little cardboard box... i didn't find it in the help... what is that?
3- can a project or task have multiple contexts? for example if i have something that i'd put in the "admin" context, can i put it in a context called "this week" also, so i can find it by selecting the "this week" context... i might post this question in the other thread about "things", since that is the way "things" works, e.g. the "today" topic... i have more explanation down in my long thread below...
-- my long topic is on "contexts".
i understand there is not "correct" way and that each person ultimately has to find what works for their needs or system. but i've been struggling with "context" for a week... and decided to just put this out there and see what happens...
i read a number of threads in this forum to know how to use contexts better and am stuck still... the thread that was most meaningful to me was "Context Lists for IT" from a year ago... since it hasn't been updated in a year, and i'm not in "IT", it seemed logical to start a new thread...
the difficulty i'm having is the following... anything about "context" that i come up with is something that is always available... for example, everything is on my macbookpro and i have it with me practically always, home, work, lunch, waiting in dentist office, even in my car when commuting... so a "context" of "computer" doesn't make sense to me since i will always have it anytime i'm referring to OF or working anything in my OF lists... it is "necessary", but so is "breathing" in order to get things done. and i will always be breathing anytime i get things done... so "computer" doesn't seem to help me anymore than "breathing" would... i do my work both at home and at the office, day, nights, weekends, whenever... so locations contexts don't seem to fit for me either since anytime i'm referring to OF i will be a place i can do the work, by definition...
i'm an engineer working in aerospace... i basically do a variety of types of things:
- work on a variety of design analyses,
- develop templates to organize my work,
- make my templates and tools available for other to use,
- train others on how to do the work, usually 1-on-1 but sometimes as a group,
- make presentations which can be either a technical presentation such as a design review or a tutorial to train others on certain topics,
- develop written instructions, and am working on updating our handbook for how to do the work...
- advise other designers about how to handle problems...
- update our web site with updates to the technical info,
the 1st item is my primary work and the other topics are background tasks that i do in order to do my primary work and to help others...
in addition to these larger projects, i want to keep a reminder for some of the administrative things that tend to get dropped when i'm very busy, like clearing out email, etc...
for the larger projects, i work on the tasks based upon when the tools i'm working on will be needed in the engineering design and development cycle... most of my work i do by myself and doesn't require anyone else, with the obvious exceptions of meetings, which are already in my calendar...
i've entered many of these projects and tasks in OF in the projects view... i'm stumped on how to come up with useful contexts to work them of in a context view... they are all "work"... anytime i'll be looking at OF or doing this work, i'll be on my computer, so "computer" doesn't really seem to help... i work on many of these things virtually anywhere, waiting room for a dentist or doctor, laundromat, library, cafeterias, etc... (i admit i don't have much of a life besides work...). so location, or weekend, or workweek don't make any sense...
when i think about how to group them or sort them to work them off my list, the "necessary and sufficient resources" that occurred to me for the majority of the items are basically "development time"... during days with lots of interactions with people, then i don't have "development time"... so i can't do any of those "development" tasks... someone said in one of the threads in this forum that "time" and "thinking" are not good "contexts", but it is one of the few things that comes to me in terms of a resource that is available only sometimes and not others... it is also the determining factor about whether or not i can work on many of these tasks...
something that has me uncertain about "development time" category is that the tasks have a "duration" field in the inspector pane... so maybe i should be using that instead of a context of "development time", which for me is large enough blocks of time to make meaningful progress but not necessarily enough time to finish a task... anything less than a couple hours is generally not sufficient to make progress on the development tasks, since a particular step may take a couple days to complete in actual elapsed time... on the other hand, some steps can take a week or more to complete, like updating one of the databases... so the duration would not match if i were looking for what i could get done in a 3 hr block of time...
the other "context" that occurred to me in terms of helping me organize the material into a working list is a "admin" category for administrative type things that don't need a large block of time... so, i can put a block of time in my calendar, like 1st thing in the morning or last thing at the end of the workday for things like timecards, clearing out email, etc... i know "admin" seems more like a "project" category, but there are tasks in separate projects that are "admin" in nature, like posting the current templates to the web site which is not like "development time" at all... and i'll keep the "posting" task organized under the project for the individual template so i can check it of when it is done (i have forgotten sometimes to post a template that has been updated because i can be interrupted a lot)... so an "admin" category for me would be analogous to an "errand" category... no real thinking, just doing... maybe "chores" would be another way of describing it...
when planning or working on things, i tend to think in terms of time... so i was considering making a few contexts of "near term" vs "long term" or "this week" or "later" to help me sort things out that way... i'm not quite sure how i'll use them... this is related to my question #3 about having multiple "contexts" for a task... (i played a little with "things" for a day and found that i could sort things by "this week", "later", "near term", etc... that seemed to be a practical way to find items in the database... to focus on only those items that are "this week" and filter out all the other distractions...) i find the "chandler" calendar program also very helps because it as a view mode that displays the calendar and "to-do" grouped by "now", "later", and "done", which i find very practical for reducing the clutter and providing an efficient working list... i know there has been a bit if discussion about the "today" concept... i plan to work on that more when i understand the OF software better... so that may be the best way to address this issue, when i get there...
perhaps the best way to articulate this is that when i think of "contexts", i think of how i need to use the "context" in order to find what i need to do, since the context is a way to make things show up in a list... i know there are "perspectives" too, but i'm not there yet...
at this point, i feel like i should just try what i've come up with and see how it works, then refine as something new comes to mind... i feel like i'm really spinning my wheels trying to set up this system and i probably need to try something to understand it better... at least i can start "doing" again using trial and error... i've been out sick and have had the luxury of time to tinker... but i have to get back to accomplishing things... am getting a little stir crazy otherwise...
i'm really surprised at how hard this is for me to absorb...
thanks for reading and any suggestions...
i'm new to OF... i have a few simple questions and then a more involved conundrum...
my simple questions are:
1- i've noticed that people put "@" in their contexts, like "@work", "@computer", or something... is the "@" a special character for OF that makes it do something or interpret the item differently? sometimes the posts have "*" or "..." too in the contexts. are those just fillers for posting or are they also some kind of special characters for OF? or are these just use for alignment or some other visual appeal? i didn't find anything in the help about this yet...
2- in projects mode, OF shows either series or parallel icons for the project in the content pane... but the inspector pane has a 3rd symbol for projects besides the series/parallel that looks like a little cardboard box... i didn't find it in the help... what is that?
3- can a project or task have multiple contexts? for example if i have something that i'd put in the "admin" context, can i put it in a context called "this week" also, so i can find it by selecting the "this week" context... i might post this question in the other thread about "things", since that is the way "things" works, e.g. the "today" topic... i have more explanation down in my long thread below...
-- my long topic is on "contexts".
i understand there is not "correct" way and that each person ultimately has to find what works for their needs or system. but i've been struggling with "context" for a week... and decided to just put this out there and see what happens...
i read a number of threads in this forum to know how to use contexts better and am stuck still... the thread that was most meaningful to me was "Context Lists for IT" from a year ago... since it hasn't been updated in a year, and i'm not in "IT", it seemed logical to start a new thread...
the difficulty i'm having is the following... anything about "context" that i come up with is something that is always available... for example, everything is on my macbookpro and i have it with me practically always, home, work, lunch, waiting in dentist office, even in my car when commuting... so a "context" of "computer" doesn't make sense to me since i will always have it anytime i'm referring to OF or working anything in my OF lists... it is "necessary", but so is "breathing" in order to get things done. and i will always be breathing anytime i get things done... so "computer" doesn't seem to help me anymore than "breathing" would... i do my work both at home and at the office, day, nights, weekends, whenever... so locations contexts don't seem to fit for me either since anytime i'm referring to OF i will be a place i can do the work, by definition...
i'm an engineer working in aerospace... i basically do a variety of types of things:
- work on a variety of design analyses,
- develop templates to organize my work,
- make my templates and tools available for other to use,
- train others on how to do the work, usually 1-on-1 but sometimes as a group,
- make presentations which can be either a technical presentation such as a design review or a tutorial to train others on certain topics,
- develop written instructions, and am working on updating our handbook for how to do the work...
- advise other designers about how to handle problems...
- update our web site with updates to the technical info,
the 1st item is my primary work and the other topics are background tasks that i do in order to do my primary work and to help others...
in addition to these larger projects, i want to keep a reminder for some of the administrative things that tend to get dropped when i'm very busy, like clearing out email, etc...
for the larger projects, i work on the tasks based upon when the tools i'm working on will be needed in the engineering design and development cycle... most of my work i do by myself and doesn't require anyone else, with the obvious exceptions of meetings, which are already in my calendar...
i've entered many of these projects and tasks in OF in the projects view... i'm stumped on how to come up with useful contexts to work them of in a context view... they are all "work"... anytime i'll be looking at OF or doing this work, i'll be on my computer, so "computer" doesn't really seem to help... i work on many of these things virtually anywhere, waiting room for a dentist or doctor, laundromat, library, cafeterias, etc... (i admit i don't have much of a life besides work...). so location, or weekend, or workweek don't make any sense...
when i think about how to group them or sort them to work them off my list, the "necessary and sufficient resources" that occurred to me for the majority of the items are basically "development time"... during days with lots of interactions with people, then i don't have "development time"... so i can't do any of those "development" tasks... someone said in one of the threads in this forum that "time" and "thinking" are not good "contexts", but it is one of the few things that comes to me in terms of a resource that is available only sometimes and not others... it is also the determining factor about whether or not i can work on many of these tasks...
something that has me uncertain about "development time" category is that the tasks have a "duration" field in the inspector pane... so maybe i should be using that instead of a context of "development time", which for me is large enough blocks of time to make meaningful progress but not necessarily enough time to finish a task... anything less than a couple hours is generally not sufficient to make progress on the development tasks, since a particular step may take a couple days to complete in actual elapsed time... on the other hand, some steps can take a week or more to complete, like updating one of the databases... so the duration would not match if i were looking for what i could get done in a 3 hr block of time...
the other "context" that occurred to me in terms of helping me organize the material into a working list is a "admin" category for administrative type things that don't need a large block of time... so, i can put a block of time in my calendar, like 1st thing in the morning or last thing at the end of the workday for things like timecards, clearing out email, etc... i know "admin" seems more like a "project" category, but there are tasks in separate projects that are "admin" in nature, like posting the current templates to the web site which is not like "development time" at all... and i'll keep the "posting" task organized under the project for the individual template so i can check it of when it is done (i have forgotten sometimes to post a template that has been updated because i can be interrupted a lot)... so an "admin" category for me would be analogous to an "errand" category... no real thinking, just doing... maybe "chores" would be another way of describing it...
when planning or working on things, i tend to think in terms of time... so i was considering making a few contexts of "near term" vs "long term" or "this week" or "later" to help me sort things out that way... i'm not quite sure how i'll use them... this is related to my question #3 about having multiple "contexts" for a task... (i played a little with "things" for a day and found that i could sort things by "this week", "later", "near term", etc... that seemed to be a practical way to find items in the database... to focus on only those items that are "this week" and filter out all the other distractions...) i find the "chandler" calendar program also very helps because it as a view mode that displays the calendar and "to-do" grouped by "now", "later", and "done", which i find very practical for reducing the clutter and providing an efficient working list... i know there has been a bit if discussion about the "today" concept... i plan to work on that more when i understand the OF software better... so that may be the best way to address this issue, when i get there...
perhaps the best way to articulate this is that when i think of "contexts", i think of how i need to use the "context" in order to find what i need to do, since the context is a way to make things show up in a list... i know there are "perspectives" too, but i'm not there yet...
at this point, i feel like i should just try what i've come up with and see how it works, then refine as something new comes to mind... i feel like i'm really spinning my wheels trying to set up this system and i probably need to try something to understand it better... at least i can start "doing" again using trial and error... i've been out sick and have had the luxury of time to tinker... but i have to get back to accomplishing things... am getting a little stir crazy otherwise...
i'm really surprised at how hard this is for me to absorb...
thanks for reading and any suggestions...
Threaded Mode