Here you can review your decisions to add an Action Item to an Action Group or a Project.
Flesh out topics that may need more than one action, and flesh out the Action Items. For example,
change the Action Item Hair, to Call Hair by Koos at 555-999-9876 to schedule a hair cut and blow wave for next week Wednesday.
change the Action Item Lunch, to the following Action Group:
Make appointment for lunch with Piet at 555-999-9875
Make appointment for lunch with Susan at 555-999-9874
Make appointment at Fine Dining diner at 555-999-9873
Make your actions as specific, actionable and with an exact date.
Area of Focus concept
Different people mean different things with this concept. One way would be to split things into Personal and Work areas. Another could be topics of ongoing education, depending on your area of expertise. I will say more about how to implement this in the How to use the Organise View below
How to use the Organise view
In this view of your Action Item List, you will see all actions that have a status of Not Started, Incubate and In Progress.
In the previous step, you made sure you understood what each item is, what the next actionable item is, or you set its status to Incubate.
In this Organise step you will now go into the next level of detail.
Add due Dates, as part of prioritising the list.
If necessary, add further detail in the Description, or the Detailed Notes column.
Use the Cross Reference columns to link to existing notes in your dbNotes table. If you make a link to the Note in Cross Reference 1 column, the linked note will automatically backlink to this Action Item in its Cross Reference 2 column. You can also add new notes, and the destination note will automatically be created. When ready, you will use the link to navigate to the row in dbNotes and capture your information.
Use the Location column to record where an Action Item is to be executed, e.g. at Home or the Office. It is possible to select more than one entry, if an Action Item can be executed in more than one place. Use this as a filter when you are in a specific location, to get all Action Items associated with that location. Add other areas if needed to the Select List, for example a customer location.
Meetings: Remember that you have a Note type for Meetings, which will create a meeting entry in dbNotes with the Meeting templated copied into Detailed Notes. Create the Meeting entry first, and then Cross Reference your meeting related Action Items to the meeting.
Area of Focus
Depending on what you want to achieve using this concept, there are different ways to implement this in the Integrated Thinking Environment.
Tags: For example Personal/ Work split, and never the twain shall meet.
In this approach, you could use the tags available in the dbNotes table. You could use the Unstructured Tag and add the two values to that. If you want to build a hierarchical structure underneath that, use the Tag 1,Tag 2and Tag 3columns to build it.
Projects: For example ongoing education
Using Project, create a project for each area of ongoing education, and schedule your education Action Items using that project. (Maybe create them with a prefix AF.) Ongoing education can be then associated with specific Projects that you are working on, and it would be nice to link the education project to the work project. Simply change the Project column to allow multiple project entries.
This is useful if you are planning work projects, and you realise that you are going to need to learn this, that and the other thing by certain dates. Which dates are different for different projects. Having the educational Action Items linked to both the work project and the education project allows you to also have an education view of your action items, and see wheich topics are duplicated or overlapping. This will enable you to better schedule your learning activities.