I do the opposite to John. Rather than trying to assign goals to tasks, assign tasks and projects to the goal they will achieve (or the role they come under). My outline is structured so that I group things into Roles and Goals (as per Stephen Covey's system). So my task outline is grouped into the following hierarchy:
- *Areas of Life *at the top level (those areas being four quadrants: Personal, Home, Work and Community) - Level 2 is for my *Roles *(under the Home quadrant, my Roles might include husband, father, home maintenance, finances. Under the Work quadrant, I have things like Line Manager, Discipline Lead, Control Systems Specialist, Technical Reviewer, etc). It's amazing how many different roles a person ends up performing, for one employment. - Level 3 is for my *Goals and Projects*. For example, in my Role as a Control Systems Specialist, I may have a Goal to "develop a team of SCADA specialists" and I may have several projects on which I'm responsible for delivering the design of the industrial control system. - Level 4 onwards - Each project and Goal will have several *tasks* under it. Some Goals might have tasks grouped into small projects grouped under them. For my purposes, I don't need to split my Goals into Yearly, Monthly and Weekly, because I don't spend time viewing or reviewing them separately at these different levels. I just make them all Yearly Goals and assign the appropriate due date to each of them. I find it helps to group my tasks and projects under roles and goals in my outline, because that helps me to make sure I prioritise those projects and tasks which align with my goals and ignore or delegate those tasks which don't really fit into my current roles. Hope that's helpful. Stéphane On Wednesday, 30 November 2016 21:46:51 UTC, John . Smith wrote: > > IMHO, it's very very messy whatever you do. > > If I'm correct, the core problem is that although MLO does have an > underlying database field for Goal (with possible values of Week, Month, > Year or None), there is no way of allocating any such goal to a task. > > Yes you can use folders, but that only works of you're not using folders > for something else. > > Yes you can use Context Tags but that clutters up you contexts and becomes > messy. > > MLO is already said by many to already be "too complicated" and "too > bloated" but to my way of thinking there needs to be a way of very easily > allocating goals to task. Like with a paint brush. This would be a very > powerful feature. > > - Any takers? > > J > > On Wednesday, November 30, 2016 at 8:24:44 AM UTC, James D wrote: > >> No articles or tuturials I can think of aside from the ones in MLO help >> files, but here are some ideas to try out. >> >> For the longest time, I kept my goals and supporting tasks in my task >> outline view (Outline/All Tasks) also by time period, e.g., a tree for >> Week, Month, Year. Bad idea. Just mark them as goals for whatever they >> are, and don't try too hard to organize your project/task outline >> chronologically. Then use the "Goals" view to work with your goals, and >> make sure everything you intend to have as a goal and work and track via >> MLO is shown in that view, for the appropriate time period. >> >> (I'm assuming you know to use the task/folder properties window to mark >> tasks/folders as "goal for" Week/Month/Year.) >> >> I like to use folders as goals, that is, title the folder in terms of the >> outcome or positive statement of the accomplished goal, and then set the >> priority at that level. So if I have a goal for the year of something like >> "I am under 180lbs, run 10K under 55m, feel strong, can do vigorous hikes, >> bike fast, play full 90 minute game of soccer", then I would create that as >> a folder and mark it as "goal for"/Year. Then, under that, I might have >> additional sub-folders like "I Include a well-researched weight training >> program as part of my regular weekly fitness habits" and mark that as a >> goal for the month. Then, under that, I might have another folder like >> "Draft and trial an initial weight training program for a few weeks". >> Under that folder, I might have specific tasks like "Research what >> programs would be appropriate for my goals" and "Choose an initial weight >> training program and try it for two weeks" as tasks. FWIW, I would >> typically mark the folder above those two tasks with the "Complete subtasks >> in order" checkmark, so that only the "next" actionable task shows in the >> outline, rather than having to see and deal with overwhelming tons of >> tasks, only a few of which are currently relevant and actionable. >> >> One thing I suggest is to edit the settings for the default "Goals" view >> to sort by "Importance" descending, at least if you use the >> Steven-Covey-popularized Important/Urgent Quadrants I-IV approach. >> Otherwise, the order in which things appear in your list of goals makes no >> sense. >> >> >> Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any follow-up questions and with any >> luck you'll get lots of great responses. >> >> On Monday, November 28, 2016 at 12:52:00 AM UTC-8, c.k. lester wrote: >> >>> I would like to see more information about managing "Goals." I have a >>> general idea of how they might work, but I'd like to see a tutorial of them >>> in practice. Anybody have articles or videos in this regard? >>> >>> Thanks! >>> >>> >> -- 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 mylifeorganized+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to mylifeorganized@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/722b8e20-163e-42f4-b18c-24f82a02cbdf%40googlegroups.com. 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