Tip: Using Goals as "Areas"

Folke

01/16/2014 13:04

Many users like to separate their work from their private affairs. One way to do that to some extent in Doit is to use the Goal feature.

Technically speaking, the Goal feature is just an additional hierarchical level above projects, allowing you to keep your projects grouped together in whatever way suits you, for example into a Work "area" and a Private "area".

The functionality surrounding Goals in Doit is not very impressive. All you get is a section of the left menu called Goals by which you can access your projects more easily than finding them in the long Projects list. But it is better than nothing. It allows me to keep the long Projects section of the left menu collapsed most of the time, and only the Goals section open.

I have split my "life" into 5 sectors (Goals), each one of them containing a bunch of projects, which in turn contain tasks. My "Goals" are:

- a private "area"
- a not-for-profit "area"
- a general business "area"
- a major business development venture
- a second major business development venture

Only the last two are true goals in the GTD sense - where a goal (30 k ft) is a major concrete objective, a "super-project" that will hopefully be completed and successful in a couple of years.

The first three "goals" are not true goals that will ever be completed. They are of a more permanent nature, but I have still chosen to use the Goal feature for it, because it gives me overview and structure and is perfectly in line with GTD (aside from the name "goal") . Each of these three "goals" of mine actually represents an entire group of what GTD calls Areas of Responsibility (AoR). I have defined 10 AoRs for myself. Typical numbers are 10-20.

Under each Goal I have a set of projects that belong to that Goal or will help bring it about. Most of my projects are true regular projects that will be finished sooner or later, but a few of them, 10 all in all, serve as more permanent AoR buckets where I collect small tasks that do not belong to the other projects and are too small to justify a project of their own. http://help.doit.im/group/topic/60

All in all, I very much like and recommend this combined use of Goals and Projects for both "true" projects & objectives and for "areas" (single AoRs and entire groups of AoRs).

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• hntopper  (积分：395)01/16/2014 19:42
  1 floor

  @Folke,
  Thank you for continously sharing your methods, viewpoints and processes with us. The more people share, the more we can learn.
  
  I have a question for you regarding your use of Goals. Simply given the limited functionality at the present time of Goals within Doit, is the value add that Goals provide you simply visual? Meaning, it allows you to break down your projects and or tasks into a smaller number that has some relationship for one another?
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• Folke  (积分：2425)01/16/2014 21:51
  2 floor

  @hntopper - yes, unfortunately the only value right now is the visual value - the cleaner left menu, and being able to see a shorter projects list. But the effort to set it up virtually nil. When I set up a new project I just assign it to the goal it belongs to. And it stays that way.
  
  What I am hoping to achieve (by nagging and praying ;-) is that they will implement additional features that relate to Goals. Some of them should be quite simple:
  
  - list grouping by goal (Next, Waiting, Scheduled, Someday) (too detailed/cluttered to view the Next list by Project)
  - project list grouping by goal (the long project list)
  - visible goal indicator in projects list ( ¤ Work etc) whenever not grouped by goal
  - tagging of goals and having these auto-inherited down to projects and tasks (for quick filtering)
  - consolidated goal task list, similar to a project task list, but preferably limited ("filtered") as discussed in another thread here with the purpose of showing tasks that can be expected to be "hot" in the next week or two. http://help.doit.im/group/topic/87
  - advanced searching by goal (and by box and everything else that is missing there)
  - a hard on-duty / off-duty switch (nothing I need, though). I think the better and more flexible solution is do do this indirectly via tags: to be able to tag the goals and to associate selected tags to positions of the switch. This gives much better flexibility in case you have several goals (areas or objectives) and want to have switch positions that show more than one such area when the switch is in a certain position.
  
  But for now it is mainly visual. But this seemingly small benefit was half the reason I moved over here; it makes me feel better :-)
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• robmcmonigal  (积分：505)01/16/2014 22:46
  3 floor

  So Folke you make sure every task is in a project *somewhere* so that nothing gets missed on a review?
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• Folke  (积分：2425)01/16/2014 23:26
  4 floor

  Yes, Rob, I like it that way. Makes the reviewing more structured.
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• N1TeSH1FT  (积分：130)03/18/2014 21:22
  5 floor

  Actually the usage of "goals" to achieve this task could easily be eliminated if they would introduce folders (at least 1 level) for projects.
  
  That's one thing I also miss compared with OmniFocus...
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• Folke  (积分：2425)03/18/2014 23:27
  6 floor

  Hi Niteshift,
  
  I just need to double-check: How is a "Folder" different from a "Goal"?
  
  Basically I do not care much what they call it, as long as it gets the job done, but to me it seems to be the same thing - a "container" for your projects. Or is there some implied additional functionality you have in mind?
  
  For example, I think it needs to be possible to both filter and group by these "containers" (whatever they are called), and also be possible to view a consolidated task list (similar to a project task list) for the entire "container". Might these be examples of the types of features you would associate with the term Folder?
  
  Or would you use two separate container hierarchies (bot Goals and Folders) for two different purposes?
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• westis  (积分：55)03/27/2014 08:37
  7 floor

  How do you assign a new project to a Goal? I can't see anything like that when adding a new project. Also, since I can't see the actions of each project in the goal, this is for now only a tool for reviewing projects? I usually also have quite a few actions that are not part of a project. And during daily reviews, you'd still need to use the Next list, which can't be filtered by goal?
  
  Btw, it's interesting when I look for a good GTD solution, I don't google for GTD, but for Folke or Proximo... :)
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• Folke  (积分：2425)03/27/2014 10:44
  8 floor

  @westis - haha, Google searching is a science of its own :-)
  
  I agree, Doit's Goals are extremely underfeatured. All they do is help you keep a tidy left menu, and even that is not very intuitively implemented. You get projects in there by looking at the projects list (the long one or a selected goal) and then DRAG the project from the main pane onto the goal in the left menu. They need to streamline this. It seems few people manage to even find it.
  
  And most of all they need to implement the "rest" of the features. It is not enough to be able to assign a project to a goal, and then having that relationship stay almost completely hidden within the computer. It must be possible to see it and use it in a meaningful way. Goals must be visible and available for a number of useful things:
  
  - available for grouping your lists (group by Goal)
  - available for quick filtering your list
  - available for advanced saved filtering of your list (and for grouping of such saved searches)
  - visible in the long project list (either as groups or as an indicator next to the project name, analogous to how contexts and projects are shown for tasks)
  
  - AND, very importantly, as you point out, when you select a goal in the left menu you should be able to see a complete list of all tasks under that goal - regardless of whether they are under a project or directly under the goal - the project name, if any, should be visible in the usual way (as on, say, the Next list or any other list).
  
  For the task list in the main pane, the list of project names (which is all they have now) is still very useful and needs to be there, but this could be shown either in the main pane first of all as a separate group (called projects; before Next actions) or in the left menu as a temporary indented automatic expansion of the goal you have just clicked (or both).
  
  And it would be possible to take this to an even higher level (for quick review purposes) by having a "near future" smart filter for the goal task list, where only certain user-selected priorities and dates are shown.
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• westis  (积分：55)03/27/2014 10:54
  9 floor

  @Folke yeah, as always you have a lot of great ideas. You haven't thought of becoming a software developer? :)
  
  Being fairly new to Doit (having tried Zendone for awhile after I followed Proximo there from Nirvana), how are the Doit developers to respond to users' requests like these ones? If I will go all in on Doit, I don't want it to be like Nirvana, that showed great promise but in the end stopped delivering.
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• Folke  (积分：2425)03/27/2014 16:37
  10 floor

  The Doit people keep moving and keep communicating, so it is not like Nirvana. But it is not great either, because most of their attention is directed towards "childish" functionality that I do not need, and they do not seem very interested in the things that I think are truly important and more basic. Doit is still my preferred app these days, but only by an extremely narrow margin. Many other ex-Nirvana folks have moved away from here. I guess for me the main thing that keeps me here is the colored priorities.
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• westis  (积分：55)03/27/2014 17:00
  11 floor

  @Folke Zendone being the best alternative? Although I shouldn't turn this thread to yet another what-gtd-app-is-best discussion...
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• Folke  (积分：2425)03/27/2014 19:09
  12 floor

  Zendone is not for me, for a number of reasons, but it seems to be very popular among those who want a tight integration with Evernote. One very good thing about Zendone is their flexible approach to parallel and sequential tasks within a project.
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• Folke  (积分：2425)04/27/2014 12:43
  13 floor

  Update:
  
  I still use the Goal feature. I keep my Projects associated with a Goal, as described earlier, and I "think" of my stuff in terms of these Goals. And I have always kept my long Projects list manually sorted by Goal - to make the projects easy to find in the long list.
  
  But in practice, since there is no real functionality at all in Doit that supports using these Goals in any significant way at all, and none seems to be immediately underway, I'd be inclined to agree with those who say that the Goals feature has virtually zero value. The only thing it does is it allows me to keep my left menu a bit collapsed - which I like a lot - but since I then have to click twice to get to a particular project, or have to expand the long Projects lists in order to drag a task to a project, I find that I more and more keep the long (horrible; scrolled) projects list expanded at all times - and thereby sacrifice the neat overview that Goals would have given me. And this means Doit has no advantage in this respect compared with apps that have no "upper level" (Goals, Areas, Folders, Teams, Spaces, Lists, the names are many) at all above their project level.
  
  I still use Doit. It still has the quite unique combination of priority colors and a GTD-inspired left menu out of the box. That's what its main attraction is to me now. They took away the automatic priority sorting, which used to be another brilliant feature.
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• kastangen  (积分：335)06/23/2014 09:51
  14 floor

  Do you still use the GOAL feuture for weekly or daily reviews though?
  
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• Folke  (积分：2425)06/25/2014 16:31
  15 floor

  For my daily reviews I use the Next and Waiting lists.
  
  For the weekly reviews I go one goal at a time. However, I also keep my long projects list manually sorted by goal, so there is no big difference if I use he projects list or the individual goal lists.
  
  Some features are clearly missing, for example a consolidated task list for each goal, filtering and grouping by goal etc etc
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• woutercox  (积分：90)06/16/2015 07:34
  16 floor

  I agree, it's too bad "Goal" is missing from the filter functionality.
  
  I have started using goals, but right now I'm using them as some kind of super-project, or just ways to group projects so I can get a better overview of them together. For example, I have a goal "Websites" and below that is each website as a different project.
  
  The nice thing about this is, I can still assign tasks and subtasks to each website. Which is needed.
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• ifhar  (积分：10)07/03/2015 23:14
  17 floor

  I can't see a way in the web app to associate projects with goals so I use them not as areas but as an actual list of goals. Not as helpful as it could have been.
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• Folke  (积分：2425)07/04/2015 01:32
  18 floor

  @iphar
  
  It's clunky. You need to make sure the Goals section of your left menu is open. Then you click Projects in the left menu, and drag the project from the main pane to the goal in the left pane.
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• hmnk  (积分：20)08/14/2017 09:20
  19 floor

  I can't believe this post goes back to 2014 and still no "Areas" feature is implemented. I'm using Doit for years now and I keep avoiding adding my personal tasks to it because it's so not practical.
  
  I mean imagine the daily workflow. I go to work in the morning, I open Doit/Next in order to decide which tasks I'm gonna move from Next to Today. I see my list and it says: Write this email, Contact that guy, Walk the dog, Buy toilet paper. Seriously? I mean you have the filters already implemented - add a "lock" option to them and you are "done". Or add a proper "Areas" option at last.
  
  Can someone please send an update if there's something like that in the roadmap?
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