[mjt888]

Hi

I'm trying to work out how to deal with some stuff on OF. I'm just on the trial at the moment and haven't really started using OF. But I'm about to start shifting stuff over.

On things I have various tags. So if I have an action of 'email boss about XYZ', then I can tag it with computer, boss and XYZ.

So:

1. If I want to see all things relating to my boss I filter on that and it will show up.
2. If I want to see all things on my computer I can filter on that and it will show up.
3. If I want to see all actions relating to XYZ I can filter on that and it will show up.

How would I be able to have this flexibility in OF?

Apologies if this is a dumb question.

Cheers

Mike

[MutantSquid]

Welcome to the world of OmniFocus!

As a fellow Things convert, maybe I can answer your questions (if not, I'm sure others will)!

1. One of the biggest differences between OF and Things is that OF lacks the tags that Things has. Originally I thought that the tags in Things were great, but I realized that I was just cluttering my thinking with them. The first thing I did in OF was to turn what were Tags in Things into Contexts in OF and then work on how I input tasks into OF. For example, if I needed to call my boss, I'd give that a "call" context, unless it was really urgent, then I'd give it an "urgent" context, a flag, or just put in under "boss." While Things appears to be very flexible, I found that I really didn't need to tag actions with more than one....any other information that I wanted to tag I'd just write in the actual to do.

2. Again, I'd handle this with either a "computer" context or perhaps a folder named "computer" in which I'd put all my tasks, or set up a custom perspective for any "computer" contexts.

3. While you can search for XYZ, there is no real way to filter it unless you use XYZ as your context. Again, part of the simplicity of OmniFocus is that you really only need to file actions by context and then make sure you keep it up.

Here's a real life example from my usual day (I'm a teacher, the school webmaster, on a bunch of committees, etc). When I get an email from my boss to add a flyer to the school website, in Things I'd put something like "add flyer to website" and then tag it with Boss, Website, School, Attachment, Online, Mac, etc as those are all relevant tags...in my opinion, this is TOO MUCH FOR SUCH A SIMPLE TASK.

With OmniFocus, I just hit control-O in Entourage and send the email to Omnifocus (this is a free Entourage to OF script that I LOVE). OF takes the header of the email "post to website" and makes this the title of the todo. I add the following to it for clarity "Add email attachment to website for boss" and then add it to the "online" context and give it a due date. I just need the one context, "online" because I need to be online to download the flyer from my email and then to upload it, and in order to be online, I have to be at a computer, so a "computer" context is redundant and unnecessary. I don't need a "boss" tag because it really has nothing to do with her, it just CAME from her. So really, all I need to know is where I have to be to get this task done and by what due date.

Hopefully this was of some help, if not, I highly suggest watching the OF screen casts, poking around in this forum, and checking out the OF documentation from Omni.

[whpalmer4]

If you really want to "tag" things in OF, you can. Just put something like "Tag:Boss" or "Tag:XYZ" or even "Tag:Boss Tag:XYZ" in the notes field. When you want to filter on that, just use the find command to search for your tag(s). You can even save perspectives with a find command active if you want one-click access to a certain tag search.

The reason for the "Tag:" bit is to make reasonably sure that you won't have the tag name appearing elsewhere in an action or project name, which would cause it to turn up in searches where you might not want it.

[Toadling]

Originally Posted by MutantSquid

While Things appears to be very flexible, I found that I really didn't need to tag actions with more than one....any other information that I wanted to tag I'd just write in the actual to do.

A couple years ago, Merlin Mann did a presentation with the Omni Group at WWDC and brought up a very similar point. He didn't specifically mention Things, but he did talk about tagging in GTD systems.

Merlin argued that the ultimate goal is to get stuff done, to increase productivity and reduce stress. It's not about building an exhaustive taxonomy of your projects, classifying and organizing rather than doing. To that end, Merlin dismissed tagging as unnecessary fiddling that poses an obstacle to accomplishing your true productivity goals.

I agree with Merlin (and MutantSquid). I've found a single context is all I need to focus on what's truely important in a task. An item might be associated with making a call and my boss. But unless I absolutely must contact my boss by phone, a "call" context is unnecessary cruft. What's truly important is that I communicate with my boss, whether that be face-to-face, by phone, email, or smoke signals.

When entering new tasks, I don't waste time thinking about all the facets of my life that the action might impact. I just pick the single most important context and move on. It might not always be the best choice, but that's what daily/weekly reviews are for: reasses and reassign as necessary. Over time, I think I've gotten pretty good at identifying what's important and assigning a context that's meaningful and leads to getting the thing done. Couple that with a simple folder hierarchy for my "areas of responsibility" and I'm all set.

-Dennis

[Arild]

Having tried Things for a month, I totally agree with Toadling and MutantSquid. The tags and the way they are hierarchically ordered in Things are great - for reference. But not to get things done. GTD requires some self discipline, because it is tempting to jot down all associations that comes to mind around a task, but with the information overflow most of us are exposed to, that is simply more work than most tasks require.

To start with, I overused OF, wanting to manifest the entire process of thinking and work "inside" the program in stead of focusing on what it does best, which is keeping your personal workflow clean, across areas of responsibilities.
Today, I use Evernote before I know if I need to act upon information, and I use tags there for future reference. If a specific tag or combination of tags occurs a lot, that fact might prompt me to take action - in OF...
But there are lots of ways to get ahead; OS X' native notes, Bento, perhaps mind mapping software, or, of course, Omni's Omnioutliner for stuff where you need structured reference more than associative help. Most Mac software has a trial period, so you can try out what works best for you before investing too much time and money in it. But remember that if structured cross-reference is VERY important, a good relation database program is really the only thing that works 100% (provided you have the money or knowledge to customise it to your needs).

To sum up: My experience is that keeping your "actionable items" as simple as you can is the most important, and for that purpose, Omnifocus works better than Things. Things really lacks tools for structuring the workflow, particularly in projects. With Things, you find yourself trying to replace those missing tools by adding tags and then you keep asking yourself if you are ready to start action until it is too late anyway...

[wilsonng]

Instead of using tags to find stuff, I make heavy use of perspectives. I don't really care too much for tags.

I tried using tags in iPhoto but ended up saying "screw it". I listened to Merlin Mann on a MacPowerUser podcast and he had an interesting things to say about tags. If you wanted to do a search in iPhoto, you just enter text into the search bar. That's what the search bar is for. My photos will generally have tags entered as part of the name. I would have a photo with the name "Sue's birthday-Sue, Kids, balloons" So if i did a search for balloons, I'll tend to find all the photos that have balloons in the file name.



Like Toadling, I love using perspectives to focus on certain things. I can click on a perspective button on my toolbar to switch to my most used views. I have perspectives for the current active projects so that I can see just the actions that are related to certain projects. I have a Planning perspective to help me plan and brainstorm. There is also a weekly review perspective to help me focus on review and planning. Then there are various Context perspectives that comes and goes. These are all the kind of stuff that Things tries to do with "tags."

[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.

J.

[new user]

have you looked at omniplan for managing large-scale projects involving many people...?

[Brian]

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.

Understood; this is one of the areas of OmniFocus that we plan to work on going forward. FWIW, I'm essentially middle-management here at Omni; I end up interacting with the majority of the folks here pretty regularly. Here's how I handle those interactions in current versions of OmniFocus. Hope this helps!

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!

[snpower]

"With OmniFocus, I just hit control-O in Entourage and send the email to Omnifocus (this is a free Entourage to OF script that I LOVE)"

Where can this script be found?