Some thoughts on Workspaces

[Alan Limebeer]

Hello all,

So I'm a loooooooong-time user (early 2000's) of MLO and have configured and used it in many different ways over the years, trying to leverage the full power of this amazing tool to capture all my interests and to-do items across all my Areas of Focus, Interest, and Responsibility, present them in clean, organized, and optimized and relevant lists, and do all that in as efficiently and easily as possible. It's been a long journey of testing, trying things out, chucking out ideas that didn't work, going back to the drawing board, re-investigating MLO features and how to leverage them And today, using a combination of flags, folders, projects, outlines, lists, importance, urgency, contexts, and some very fancy Advanced Filtered Views, I have a system that truly captures "everything" in an almost perfect system and process that is easy to use, update, and add to. But over the years, the one feature that has eluded my understanding has been Workspaces. I've never been able to come up with a way to leverage WS to make my system more efficient and easier to use. I've always ended up abandoning any configuration that included them because they inevitably ended up complicating things and slowing things down, becoming cumbersome and unwieldy. Now, I want to be clear, this is completely a failing on my part to understand how they were meant to be used, and not the result of a poor or pointless design. I've never seemed to be able to get my head around how to use them right, and I've never liked that. If there's a way for a tool to help make things easier to manage, I want to utilize it. So with that in mind, I set out this week to finally be able to check off "complete MLO setup" in my "implement GTD" project :)

After spending a few hours over the last couple of days combing through the posts in this Group and Googling the net in general, I think I've distilled the purpose of Workspaces down to a very simple and concise explanation and I wanted to post it here to see if any of you all might share what you think about what I've come up with. What I've come to understand about Workspaces is as follows:

Essentially, workspaces are used to apply views to a subset of the outline.

➜ either to apply different views to the same subset(zoom) of the outline, or

➜ to apply the same view to multiple, different, subsets at the same time, without having to zoom out, find a different branch, and zooming back in.

 

You can also customize a view (adding further filters, groupings, sortings, etc.) applied to a Workspace without affecting other Workspaces using that view (unless you Save the view, then it overwrites the view and applies it to all Workspaces currently using it) without having to create a new, separate, and specialized View for one specific purpose (the goal being to keep your views as generic as possible so they can be applied and reused in multiple "contexts" (general meaning of the term context, not MLO-specific).

So far this definition has been working really well, and I'd love to hear any feedback or thoughts any of you pro users might have. Have I missed anything? Is there another way to interpret or use the feature-set of Workspaces? Did I nail it? Is there anything else I should consider them for?

Looking forward to hearing thoughts.

Cheers all,

Alan

[Dwight]

Hi, Alan. I think that you have created comprehensive and definitive
documentation of the function of a workspace, omitting just one small
point which I will get to later. You may or may not want to also mention
use cases that give the workspace value to the user - my favorite is use
of the tab bar as a kind of speed dial for views. I keep 26 of my
favorite views (or view/zoom combinations) in tabs, each locked and
pinned so that only the icon shows (I have many custom icons). I'm able
to bring up the exact view I want in a single click almost every time.

The missing piece is synchronization of selection and zoom. I don't use
zoom synch much but selection synch is very useful. For readers who
don't know, I will explain that the workspace setup window allows the
user to control several things about functioning of a workspace, one of
which is "synch selection with first tab". This is one of several
aspects of MLO which dictate that the first tab should always be a
locked, pinned "All Tasks" view. Here is a scenario that shows the use
of this option:

My setup has four tabs, all locked and pinned. First is All Tasks.
Second is Calls, showing every active task whose context includes
"call". The third is for my customer BVMI, and shows anything with the
#BVMI context, together with all children. The fourth is "recently
modified" showing any task modified in the last three days, sorted and
grouped by date/time modified, most recent first.The workspaces for
Calls and BVMI are set to synch with the first workspace, RecentMod is not.

I see an RFP from BVMI's competitor NJPHC and add a note to my inbox to
look into submitting a bid. Later, I am making my morning phone calls
and the next one is Touch base with BVMI >WorkCallsEastern #BVMI. I tap
on the task to select it and display the note which gives me the phone
number and some reminders from my last call. I tap the phone number
which places the call. While the phone is dialing, I tap the BVMI tab.
The tab comes up, showing me everything in my profile related to this
client. There are a few pages of it, but the display is open to the
project that we need to discuss. We discuss the project stats, the
weather, and the customer's daughter's upcoming wedding. I mention, for
full disclosure, that I will be considering submitting a bid for NJPHC.
My client gives me several good reasons to forego this bid so I tap the
RecentMod tab, delete the note about the bid, tap the BVMI tab and
finish discussing projects, tap the calls icon, mark the call completed,
and go on to the next call.

How did selection synch help me?

When I was viewing the CALLS workspace and tapped the Touch Base with
BVMI task, it became the currently selected task in the Calls workspace.
Because the Calls workspace does selection synch with the first tab (All
Tasks), Touch Base With BVMI also becomes the currently selected task in
All Tasks. Because the BVMI workspace does selection synch with the
first tab, Touch Base with BVMI is now the selected task in the BVMI
tab. (This is all really just to make Calls and BVMI synch selection
with each other, All Tasks is just a necessary intermediary). When I tap
the BVMI tab, it will open to the correct page because the Touch Base
task is the currently selected item and the view opens there.

When I tapped the RecentMods tab, it did not try to find the Touch Base
item because it does not do selection synch. When I go back to the Calls
page, it is still pointing to my current call. My activity on the Recent
Mods page did not affect the current selection, even though Calls synchs
selection, because RecentMods does not synch selection.

I hope this gives you an idea of when to use and when not to use
selection synch.

-Dwight

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to mylifeorganiz...@googlegroups.com
> <mailto:mylifeorganiz...@googlegroups.com>.
> To post to this group, send email to mylifeo...@googlegroups.com
> <mailto:mylifeo...@googlegroups.com>.
> Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/935778ce-a80b-4a5a-b567-9231a43939d3%40googlegroups.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/935778ce-a80b-4a5a-b567-9231a43939d3%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Michael Emerald, CFA]

Hi Guys.

I hope you're having a good weekend.

First,, Alan, I salute you for being, like me, a tech-slut: as soon as I fall in love with one system for more than a month, it seems I think of a better way to do things and I'm on to something different. Like you, though, I always come back to MLO. Second...

...I love workspaces. I use them for different contexts. So, today I went with Sharon to a coffeeshop and dialed in my "Remote Personal" workspace and all the views within it use remote personal contexts. Next I came back to my office, where I use a "Work Office" workspace, again with views using relevant contexts. Finally, when I take a workbreak, I punch up "Break Office" for everything I want to do during a break at the office. I have a similar one "Break Home" for breaks at home if I'm working. I prefer workspaces versus different views for these for two reasons. One is it would result in a lot of extra views all appearing at once on my view list. Second is that it allows me to set up one VIEW, called "Active tasks", which varies only as a result of changing the workspace (again, the contexts change workspace to workspace).

Have a Great Week, Men.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mylifeorganiz...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to mylifeo...@googlegroups.com.

Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/28fea7d1-cacf-050e-9410-96bda5f6ffe4%40dwightarthur.us.

[Darryl Brooks]

Just wanted to bookmark this. I'm just getting started, and this is way over my head, but definitely looks like something I want to come back and look at in a few weeks. Thanks to all who posted here for the great detail.

> <mailto:mylifeorganized+unsub...@googlegroups.com>.