Newbie asks questions about getting started
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Dwight Arthur
Oct 15, 2016, 12:08:29 AM10/15/16
to MyLifeOrganized, lakenormanva...@gmail.com
From someone I am calling "Norman" for now comes this newbie question:
Hi, Norman. You are asking about a lot of stuff, I will start off with a few observations.
1. MLO is a great tool for managing your tasks. Probably the best tool. But it does not tell you how to manage your tasks. You need a tool but you also need a methodology. A lot of people make up their own methodologies but other are better off starting by studying someone else's methodology and then modifying it as needed to fit their own circumstances. I am partial to the methodology called Getting Things Done by David Allen. You can find his book "Getting Things Done" in bookstores and libraries
2. MLO is a great tool for managing your tasks. It is less effective at managing the tasks of a big basket of different sorts of people. Some people have had good (or at least acceptable) results in using MLO to share tasks with an assistant or even across the members of a small team. There have been a few discussions on this forum about using MLO with team members, you can probably find some good hints by searching the forum. Or maybe someone with experience in this kind of thing might reply to this thread with a pointer. On the other hand, I really cannot imagine getting your customers to use MLO to check off acceptability of a location.
3. A lot of different people use MLO in different ways and none of them are "wrong" - you should use what works for you. I like to organize my tasks into an outline with headers and subheaders and groups, and then make note of the events that happen, or things I need, or places I need to be that make a task actionable. The headers and subheaders become folders and the events/things/places become contexts. For you, this would make the top folders things like maintenance, marketing, opening a rental, closing a rental, etc, and contexts would be a specific home or boat, an employee, etc. Problem with this is that if you set up different contexts for each appliance or feature in each room in each apartment in each building that is going to be an manageably long list of contexts. It's important that the tool and the methodology taken together allow you to get more done, not less. Which means that you cannot spend the day looking up obscure contexts.
4. A different approach that might work better would be to use buildings as folders with subfolders for apartments and further subfolders for rooms and further subfolders for things in the room.Advantage is that this would make it easier to set up all these rooms, buildings, appliances etc and to find the one you want. Disadvantage would be that a project that involved several locations (like, paint the doors to all the homes) would be hard to set up because it would have bits in all different folders. Another disadvantage would be that GPS can get assigned to a context but not to a folder.
I hope that other readers will offer their own thoughts on your questions.
-Dwight
I am a small biz home and boat rental. I need each home and each boat to
be listed having a 'tree' and the TODOs would be the item TO DO.
Would the Homes and Boats be Folders? Tabs?
I need to distribute the TASKS to various peoples:
Self, Maintenance and Repair, Projects - Upgrades, Cleaners, Husband
The dates would be Within: TODAY, 5 Days, A Specific date, Close of month,
I need to start assigning some tasks to Monthly, Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer creating a schedule to share with others
Perhaps I could 'import' some check lists posted on the web?
Need to develop these lists such that I can share them with workers and with guests digitally such that when they completed something it would mark it off the master list, and guests doing a walk through can check off acceptability of the home or boat and make comments.
I would also like there to be GPS tracking.
Talk to text, as well as, manual entry for comments would be ever so nice.
Would the Homes and Boats be Folders? Tabs?
I need to distribute the TASKS to various peoples:
Self, Maintenance and Repair, Projects - Upgrades, Cleaners, Husband
The dates would be Within: TODAY, 5 Days, A Specific date, Close of month,
I need to start assigning some tasks to Monthly, Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer creating a schedule to share with others
Perhaps I could 'import' some check lists posted on the web?
Need to develop these lists such that I can share them with workers and with guests digitally such that when they completed something it would mark it off the master list, and guests doing a walk through can check off acceptability of the home or boat and make comments.
I would also like there to be GPS tracking.
Talk to text, as well as, manual entry for comments would be ever so nice.
Hi, Norman. You are asking about a lot of stuff, I will start off with a few observations.
1. MLO is a great tool for managing your tasks. Probably the best tool. But it does not tell you how to manage your tasks. You need a tool but you also need a methodology. A lot of people make up their own methodologies but other are better off starting by studying someone else's methodology and then modifying it as needed to fit their own circumstances. I am partial to the methodology called Getting Things Done by David Allen. You can find his book "Getting Things Done" in bookstores and libraries
2. MLO is a great tool for managing your tasks. It is less effective at managing the tasks of a big basket of different sorts of people. Some people have had good (or at least acceptable) results in using MLO to share tasks with an assistant or even across the members of a small team. There have been a few discussions on this forum about using MLO with team members, you can probably find some good hints by searching the forum. Or maybe someone with experience in this kind of thing might reply to this thread with a pointer. On the other hand, I really cannot imagine getting your customers to use MLO to check off acceptability of a location.
3. A lot of different people use MLO in different ways and none of them are "wrong" - you should use what works for you. I like to organize my tasks into an outline with headers and subheaders and groups, and then make note of the events that happen, or things I need, or places I need to be that make a task actionable. The headers and subheaders become folders and the events/things/places become contexts. For you, this would make the top folders things like maintenance, marketing, opening a rental, closing a rental, etc, and contexts would be a specific home or boat, an employee, etc. Problem with this is that if you set up different contexts for each appliance or feature in each room in each apartment in each building that is going to be an manageably long list of contexts. It's important that the tool and the methodology taken together allow you to get more done, not less. Which means that you cannot spend the day looking up obscure contexts.
4. A different approach that might work better would be to use buildings as folders with subfolders for apartments and further subfolders for rooms and further subfolders for things in the room.Advantage is that this would make it easier to set up all these rooms, buildings, appliances etc and to find the one you want. Disadvantage would be that a project that involved several locations (like, paint the doors to all the homes) would be hard to set up because it would have bits in all different folders. Another disadvantage would be that GPS can get assigned to a context but not to a folder.
I hope that other readers will offer their own thoughts on your questions.
-Dwight
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