Delegate Methods

[bs]

The posts discussing delegated tasks are many years old. Essentially they say to include a reference to the delegated individual in the title and then set the due date to the follow-up date. Some, I know, also use context for identifying the responsible individual.

 

I was wondering if, in the ensuing years and many updates to MLO, anyone has developed a better way to handle delegates. Personally, I would prefer a field for this important piece of data.

 

Thanks for any insight.

 

-bs

 

PS: Thanks to Andrey and the team for a solid product.

[robisme (Olivier R)]

I totally agree with you.

Indeed, I dream of a next future far version of MLO wich would have a contact, calendar, and mail management, synchronized with google.

This way, using a contact as a context would be powerful, and so on.

Olivier

[Stéph]

Here's how I do it: Wherever the action involves someone else, I put their name at the top of the note with a Twitter-style tag symbol in front of it: ?John ?Smith, ?Sarah, etc. that way I can easily set up a search or filter without picking up names mentioned within the body of my notes.

For stuff I've delegated to someone, I use the context ?Waiting For. For stuff I still need to speak with them about or need to delegate, the context might be @call or @meeting.

[robisme (Olivier R)]

And what I do is dragging a contact from outlook so that I have a link toward it in the note, and I have a view for contacts with a filter "notes contains the words 'Full Name:", that give me all the contact related tasks.

But a different field like context would be good. (I used, but don't want anymore, to use context for each contacts, but my context list got cluttered).

Olivier

[J Smith]

Let me see if I understand. If I want to delegete an Action (or project) to someone called Fred for example, I would go the Action (using say "Active Actions"  on the left, and in the Properties ==> General I would enter the tag "?Fred;"

So now if on the left of the screen I click on Filter ==> Contects ==> ?Fred, in the middle of the screen I can now see all items (Actions + Projects) that have the Tag "?Fred".

BUT my problem is that just because I have given my Action the Tag "?Fred" does not mean that it will now disappear from my list of Active Actions.

So does this mean that I now need to set up some kind of filter to stop Actions with the Tag "?Fred" from appearing?? And if so do I need to do the same thing for each new person I delegate a tast to ? (Painful...!)

[Dwight Arthur]

There are a lot of ways to handle this, here are two:

1. create tags like ?Fred and ?Wilma for everyone to whom you delegate. Bring up the Context Maintenance window (F8) select all the delegation tags and mark them all "always closed"

2. create a version of the Active Actions view and add an advanced filter "Context contains '?'" But note that in some text matching apps the "?" character is a fixed length wildcard. I don't have time to check if that's true here but if it is you might be better off with some other leading character. I use <name for tasks I am giving someone else and >name for tasks someone is giving me.