Check-In Meetings, Agenda Next Actions for Support Material?

ivanjay205

Registered
For all of my direct reports I establish a bi-weekly check-in meeting for 30 minutes. While I dont put a specific agenda in the calendar invite I always follow the same format:

  1. General how are you doing question? Give them 5 minutes to vent about stuff and communicate how things are going. Sometimes this opens up the door to bigger topics, things I need to help fix, or coaching moments. Sometimes they blow off steam which is healthy too!
  2. I follow up on open items I am tracking from them. I generally go to my agenda in Omnifocus for them and rattle through the list. I keep some updated notes built into the notes area on things we discuss. Once it is resolved I check it off. Sometimes these are single items, sometimes more project related but I keep as a single item on my agendas since I am purely just following up.
  3. We talk about new development ideas depending on their role. This might be me sharing ideas with them, or diving deeper into ideas they have.

My question.... is how to distinguish what should be a next action on my agenda vs support material? I used to keep notes in Apple Notes plus my Next Actions in Omnifocus. I found it cumbersome mid meeting with someone to review both. Plus I never really had a reason to keep the notes in Apple notes. They were just there to prompt my mind.

In my new way I purely keep the open items we are working on in OmniFocus as next Actions. But that means a major business development goal (in our industry) could sit there for many many months. That isn't necessarily a problem but does add clutter (but its real).

Anyone found any best practices for this? The next action in Omnifocus works right now. But I struggle with should I have notes to reference and should everything be a Next Action? I dont have any projects associated with these people as I am only handling the followup portion.

Thanks!
 

mcogilvie

Registered
I think what you probably want is to see Agenda items related to a person at the same time, in a single program, as project support material related to that person. Agenda items are discussion items, project support is knowledge. I think you can bend Omnifocus to your will if that’s what you want.
 

ivanjay205

Registered
I think what you probably want is to see Agenda items related to a person at the same time, in a single program, as project support material related to that person. Agenda items are discussion items, project support is knowledge. I think you can bend Omnifocus to your will if that’s what you want.
So how would you structure this? Next action on the agenda list per subject with notes in the notes area? That is what I do know. It does work just doesnt feel pure gtd plus I always struggle if people find value in creating deeper notes.
 

mcogilvie

Registered
So how would you structure this? Next action on the agenda list per subject with notes in the notes area? That is what I do know. It does work just doesnt feel pure gtd plus I always struggle if people find value in creating deeper notes.
While I do store information in the notes field of next actions, I often have informational items at the same hierarchical level as next actions, but organized or labeled so they are clearly non-actionable. When I used OmniFocus, I used a tag called Information with an “On hold” status. There are ways to do this in Todoist and Things as well. It’s not vanilla GTD, but for me it’s a question of seeing the right information in the right way at the right time. If you want to see Agenda and Project support items together with the least work, that’s how.
 

grahamen

Registered
While I do store information in the notes field of next actions, I often have informational items at the same hierarchical level as next actions, but organized or labeled so they are clearly non-actionable. When I used OmniFocus, I used a tag called Information with an “On hold” status. There are ways to do this in Todoist and Things as well. It’s not vanilla GTD, but for me it’s a question of seeing the right information in the right way at the right time. If you want to see Agenda and Project support items together with the least work, that’s how.
I find this interesting, and sorry to intrude, but I am struggling with what is the difference between "On Hold" and "Waiting For" or even "Someday/Maybe"?
 

mcogilvie

Registered
I find this interesting, and sorry to intrude, but I am struggling with what is the difference between "On Hold" and "Waiting For" or even "Someday/Maybe"?
Sorry if it wasn't clear. "On Hold" is an OmniFocus status which can be assigned to items. "Waiting For" and "Someday/Maybe" are traditional GTD lists. As with most GTD-influenced apps, some work is required by the user to set up the app to match user preferences. The GTD set-up guides usually offer one or two ways to set up a GTD system, but that's often just a good starting point.
 
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