Using tags for vague times in your task manager (Omnifocus, Things, whatever)

@OogieM – I admit it: I have to be constantly reminded that a great many Americans can’t take ubiquitous Internet access for granted. And many of them aren’t impoverished, and do not live in areas that most people would consider particularly remote.

The person who most frequently reminds me of that is not a farmer or wilderness guy. He lives in a neighborhood of Los Angeles. He’s a technician who works on movie and TV, and is often called to work “on location.” His work setup needs to assume there will be no Internet access when and where he needs it. For this reason, he avoids relying on any kind of cloud service.

And to Oogie’s other point, and @ChrisUpchurch’s response – yes, GTD can and is well applied to all manner of jobs and lifestyles. But the original book was written to assume an affluent corporate executive or entrepreneurs. Most business and productivity books have been written for that audience – or, more precisely, written for that audience or for people who aspire to that position.

2 Likes

What a week - I just caught this!

Glad you found this helpful, @MitchWagner! I don’t think the philosophy requires any particular app, though. Any system with tags could do this, or even paper, where “After I Come Back” is written at the top, the tasks aligned to that are underneath, and you don’t look at the content until that condition is met :joy:

Mostly, I see this as a way of defining what things mean and the conditions for them to happen so that I don’t look at them until the appropriate time. I really like your meta task approach of “Review all the things on list x” that you see when it’s time to dig up that right list.

Love this thread, and sorry for being late to the party.

ScottyJ

3 Likes

@Bmosbacker
I followed your advice and created a daily reminder, works great!
Liked it so much I just created a weekly reminder to have a weekly overview.

Question: Is there a way to have a daily Monday-Friday reminder?
Or do I create a weekly one for every day?

Here is how I have my daily and weekly reviews setup in Things 3.

2 Likes

what, a checklist?!
embarrassed to say today I learned about checklists in Things :open_mouth:

huge thanks!

1 Like

And don’t forget about Headings. They are very useful for organizing sub-tasks.

1 Like

Sorry, I missed this until today when I was searching for an old response of mine.

Yes, I run with a very large number of active projects. I do not like subprojects so I will split things up a lot more than other people. I also do not like parallel projects, most of mine are set to run sequentially, so if I have subsets that in other implementations would be projects in a parallel project I split it out into separate projects. I also like to have available in my list of things to work on every project I could or would like to work on during this 3 month period. Some projects make it onto my list, but when review the actions never rise to the level of actually getting any work done on them in this season often for valid reasons and then will go quietly back to the someday/maybe pool when I clean out the system at my quarterly reviews.

A current example: I have a project this season (Oct-Dec) of improving the pasture stand with some diverse drought resistant plants. An action was fall seeding some sainfoin (sp?) seed in bare areas of the pasture. But it requires rain and enough time before a frost to sprout, put down roots and be ready to come back in spring. Well we never got any of our normal fall rains. So I never got the action done of fall seeding. So this quarterly review which I’ll start at the solstice I’ll take that entire project, and put it back in someday/maybe. Actually I’ll also probably do a bit of research and see if I can do some spring seeding of the plants I have the seeds for and if so I’ll make a note to re-activate it at the spring Equinox.

2 Likes

np, and thanks for the detailed writeup!