Agenda's Tag Help

[ivanjay205]

Hi everyone

I use Omnifocus on my system and although I used GTD for years I never adopted the agenda's tags until recently. I am now in love with them. However, one thing I am not quite sure is how do people ensure that they handle next actions associated with particular people in a timely fashion. For example, the owner of my company who I report to has a tag in OF under agendas. While we talk regularly and when we do I grab the tag there are times when I might be heavy on the travel schedule and I dont pull up this tag in my system because I am not seeing/talking to him. I dont necessarily tag it with email or calls because I dont want to take a call at once or I meet with him in the office as his office is directly next to mine.

What does everyone do as a best practice? Do you list call in these situations so it shows on your call list and is a regular reminder? Do you check your agendas daily (that sounds like a lot of overhead as I have a lot of reports also in there)? My agendas don't show in any of my perspectives in Omnifocus or I would be overwhelmed.

 

[mcogilvie]

I think you have to best what works for you- there‘s no one best practice. I have one “context“ for my wife and another for everybody else, because I don’t use it much- email is much more common for communication with everybody else. Some people have found it useful to lump all forms of communication together: calls, email, carrier pigeon, et cetera. One thing for sure, you have to review all forms of communication regularly. In OF you could build a perspective that includes all the communication-type tags, which might allow you to see more easily that an agenda item is now an email.

 

[Wilson Ng]

I have specific tags just for people I frequently deal with (wife, kid 1, kid, uncle 1, aunt 2, etc.). Everyone else gets lumped into a `@People` tag. I do have a `@customer` tag for general requests or follow up. But if it's a customer or person I frequently deal with, I'll create a tag for them.

When I'm sending out emails, direct messaging, or calling, I'll just hit the customer tag or the people tag.

I generally label the task such as "Facebook Joe re: BBQ" if I know Joe usually contacts me through facebook or "WhatsApp Mary re: surprise birthday party" if I know Mary likes to use WhatsApp to communicate. I don't use tags to indicate the type of communication method because Mary would be just as comfortable with communicating via WhatsApp as well as a phone call.

If I meet Joe at the coffee shop by surprise, I'll go to my `@Joe` tag to show me a list of all the things I want to talk about when I see him. I don't want to wade through the calls tag, DM tag, or email tag just to find any agenda items for that person.