Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Re: Great Tool! Looking for date of action, project and visibility of tickler grouped by contact

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 4:43 PM, Ochoa C., Frewitt SA <c....@frewitt.com> wrote:

- I'm looking for using dates for actions (specially to see what has been delegated to whom till when).
- Projects has always a start and an end date, how can I visualize this with MonkeyGTD? (At the end a list with the projects grouped by priority and/or date is the target.)
- How can I group the ticklers by contact?
 
As you see I'm trying to use MonkeyGTD to control help my team to do the delegated tasks.
 

At the moment projects don't have due date fields. One approach is to use ticklers. For instance in a project called "ProjectA" you could make a tickler on the applicable date called "ProjectA Final Deadline". Also make a few others, eg "ProjectA due one week from today". Or "... a month from today". Then you can look in your TicklerDashboard and see these things approaching.

A similar technique can be used to follow up delegations. You can convert your waiting for action to a tickler and give it a date which is the date you want to follow up with the associated contact.

This should work for grouping ticklers by contact. I will put it in an upcoming release:

<<mgtdList
    title:'Ticklers Requiring Action Grouped'
    startTag:Tickler
    tags:'!Actioned'
    view:Tickler
    group:Contact
    gView:bold
    mode:global
    newButtonTags:'Tickler Enabled Once'
    where:'tiddler.ticklerIsActive()'
    sort:'tickleDate'
    dontShowEmpty:yes
    ignoreRealm:{{config.mGTD.getOptChk('AlertsIgnoreRealm')?'yes':''}}
>>


<<mgtdList
    title:'Upcoming Ticklers Grouped'
    startTag:Tickler
    tags:'!Actioned'
    view:Tickler
    group:Contact
    gView:bold
    mode:global
    newButtonTags:'Tickler Enabled Once'
    where:'!tiddler.fields.mgtd_date || !tiddler.ticklerIsActive()'
    sort:'tickleDate'
    dontShowEmpty:yes
    ignoreRealm:{{config.mGTD.getOptChk('AlertsIgnoreRealm')?'yes':''}}
>>




3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

As a GTD purist I have to say that dates should be put in your diary, not your GTD system. That includes start and end dates for projects. If you have some heavy weight project management to do (with Gannt charts and so on), there are a million project management tools out there, and a million calander managers too. Don't turn the excellent MGTD into a ten-a-penny calendar manager.

- Jim.
When I delegate stuff, I put the action in to "wait" mode and edit the action's name, inserting the persons initials at the beginning, eg an action called "confirm Oracle support dates" becomes "JD to confirm Oracle support dates", to show I have delegated that action to John Doe. The list of waiting actions is then automatically sorted by person. Also I add a note to the action, something like "{t} mailed JD for dates" that will afterwards show me exactly when I first asked John to get involved. A week later I might mail a reminder to JD, and at the same time add nother note "{t} mailed reminder to JD".

12:30 PM PDT  
Blogger simon said...

I always had a vague feeling that I shouldn't be adding support for project due dates but I've never been able to clearly justify why. Thanks very much for clearing it up for me!

I'm curious, do you ever associate waiting actions with a contact? This might be slightly more convenient than renaming the actions.

3:05 PM PDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Simon,
I have not yet started using the "contacts" feature of MGTD. I see you can associate an action/project with a person, but you have to open an action to see who it is associated with. By renaming an action I can see who it is waiting on, right there on my waiting actions list. The contacts feature also lets you view actions by person, which is interesting (especially for team leaders) but not a key part of GTD.

Cheers,
Jim

3:37 PM PDT  

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