Hi Forum Fans,
You may have noticed that this thread by
jenkins appeared on January 23 and is showing as new today. The reason is that we made a mistake in deleting a spam post that was added to the thread, and deleted the whole thread. We apologize to
jenkins, and to
Folke and
jdavidcarr who posted replies. In the text below, we've added the replies to the original post. If any of you want to repost under your own names, please feel free.
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from Folke:
If the first/next action is not a Next action but a Waiting For action or a Calendar action, and if I cannot do any of the subsequent Next actions until after the first action is done, then I simply leave it at that. I will "activate" the following action when it becomes relevant (unless I use an app that does that automatically.)
Calendar actions are a bit of a difficulty with most apps. Ideally, I would like to have them both listed within the project AND on the calendar, but as this is not possible (or not done palatably) in most apps I keep them only on the calendar, and have them sent over 15 hours in advance to my list manager.
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from jdavidcarr:
Meeting just to meet would be a waste of everyone's time; there must be some purpose to meeting, right? That's your next action, not the meeting itself
For example, if the meeting is to review requirements, the next action may be "review requirements" or "get group feedback on requirements document". Then the context is assigned as applicable (e.g., office, agenda/staff).
In OF, if I'm waiting for someone to respond to an inquiry, I don't create a new next action for it. I set the context of the next action about which I've inquired to Waiting. So if I need an address for a meeting, I might have an action "Determine location for off-site meeting". When I email someone for this address, the action is not complete until I get a response, so I leave the action open and change the context from "office" to "waiting". When I get a response, I complete the action. In my daily review, I look at Waiting actions and follow up as needed.
Hope this helps.
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from jdavidcarr:
Also, if you're deferring tasks until an appropriate start time, you will see them (against) your actual calendar in OF. I usually prefer this over creating blocks on my calendar for individual tasks unless they are "deep thought" tasks or time consuming. I just know I'm not particularly effective at safeguarding my calendar when things like operational fires pop up. I can manage a task list much better than specific time boxes on a calendar.
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from jenkins:
jdavidcarr said:
Meeting just to meet would be a waste of everyone's time; there must be some purpose to meeting, right? That's your next action, not the meeting itself
For example, if the meeting is to review requirements, the next action may be "review requirements" or "get group feedback on requirements document". Then the context is assigned as applicable (e.g., office, agenda/staff).
In OF, if I'm waiting for someone to respond to an inquiry, I don't create a new next action for it. I set the context of the next action about which I've inquired to Waiting. So if I need an address for a meeting, I might have an action "Determine location for off-site meeting". When I email someone for this address, the action is not complete until I get a response, so I leave the action open and change the context from "office" to "waiting". When I get a response, I complete the action. In my daily review, I look at Waiting actions and follow up as needed.
Hope this helps.
That helped a lot, thank you.
I guess I always assumed (and perhaps this was a lazy assumption) that the meeting was the Next Action. But I think you are correct. The meeting is perhaps more like a
context than an action. The mental process is more like this: "The project is to re-design our business cards. What's the Next Action? ...Well, we need to decide what our goal is with this re-design, because the overarching goal will determine the design decisions. But actually, I can't do that by myself...I should first schedule a meeting to brainstorm these goals." So you put "Schedule a brainstorming meeting re new business cards" on the appropriate NA list. That's really the "next available action" in this example. Later that day, you schedule the meeting and cross it off your list. You put the meeting on your calendar. The Next Action is now to decide on the goal of the re-design; and the context is the meeting itself.
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from jenkins:
jdavidcarr - Thought of another question. What if the Next Action really IS a calendar action, and not just a meeting? David Allen uses the example of "call Jim tomorrow @ noon" (assuming you have to call at that time, this would be a calendar action). If this were actually part of a larger project, then the NA would be on the calendar, and what would be in OF? In this example, do you think David Allen is suggesting that event goes on the calendar AND on your Calls list?
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