I’m not sure how to do this but I think it’s a great idea. You could send an email to Omnigroup with the suggestion. They’ve been responsive to my own requests of features or support.

- Kourosh

I’m curious how you or any of your readers handle the creation of waiting for tasks upon sending of emails. I send a lot of emails for which I will then await a response. I like to create a Waiting For task for each of these. However, I’m doing this manually and it is tedious. (I’m using Mac Mail and Omnifocus)

Has anyone found a way to automate the creation of the Waiting For task upon sending en email? I used to use Outlook on a PC and there was a great GTD Addon that did this. I’d love the same functionality on for Omnifocus.

Thanks!

Jim

Nice article! It’s got some interesting ways of using the notes field in it.

On a slightly related note: In Safari, I find using the Clippings feature to be great for clipping text on a webpage. It didn’t work in Firefox though (and also I’m often on a Windows PC at work) so I wrote a bookmarklet that makes use of Google mail to add in clippings into OmniFocus. The downside being that you do still have to have Mail.app running to process the incoming email but that’s a price I was willing to pay.

Article here: http://paulstonedesign.com/blog/article/bookmarklet-to-add-the-currently-viewed-web-page-to-omnifocus/

Thanks,
Paul.

That’s a nice idea on the “Action Items” in Gmail. Presently, I star the ones that I want to get to and have a review for importing starred emails into OF daily at 10am. Once it’s in, I remove the star – very similar to the Action Items work.

I just downloaded the gmail app you mentioned after reading your comment. It’s great for that ability to add the star or sort in folders. Prior, I would just mark something important as “unread” until I could get to it from the computer. The gmail app allows a smoother system.

All in all, we’re creating “buckets” that eventually trickle into the central bucket of OF.

I’ve been using the general methods listed above for some time now in terms of linking to e-mail messages from OF tasks, although the keyboard shortcuts and the datestamp trick in “Waiting for” are quite useful.

As a very mobile user, I have an extra step in my process, however. Since there’s no simple way to create a task and link the e-mail message to it on the iPhone, I have an additional Folder/GMail label called “Action Items” and a daily recurring task to “Review Action Items” each morning as part of my daily review.

How I use this is thus: When I’m mobile and I receive an e-mail message that needs to be actioned in the future (ie, not today), I moved it to the “Action Items” folder using the iPhone Mail client (you can also do this via the GMail Mobile Browser, but it’s an extra step to label and then archive). It sits off in that area until my next daily review, at which time I can follow the normal e-mail triage process with it (do, delegate, defer). From there, if I need to create a task to action it, I then do so, pasting the link into the message, and removing the “Action Items” label (since this is no longer required once the item is in OmniFocus).

I keep similar labels for items that get kept for reference or later reading, but don’t necessarily require action.

Items that need to be actioned today but can’t be done from my iPhone get left in my inbox so that they stay on my radar and get picked up when I’m back at my desk at the end of the day.

I find this generally helps me keep to an “Inbox Zero” state as I’m out and about checking my e-mail on the go, rather than letting things pile up and having to re-triage them when I get back to my desk.