Federico Viticci describes his use of Perspectives in OmniFocus to group his work by tags. Ignoring the perspectives themselves, it’s an interesting application of tags in OmniFocus that would surely make a GTD purist turn away in horror.
Viticci uses dates and a combination of tags, a feature not added to OmniFocus until version three, and one which was eschewed by the developers. Prior to version three, they weren’t called “tags” even–they were, in strict GTD parlance, “contexts.” You got one context per action item. No more.
Trying to glean a bit from his screenshots, it seems to me his use of projects are more like areas of responsibility (eg “Podcasts”). For this, I would be inclined to use folders. A project would be a specific episode of a podcast, with the corresponding tasks that are required to enact the goal–in this case, posting the episode. As in GTD, a project is something that takes more than one step. And to the degree possible, a project’s name should specify the desired outcome.
His use of emoji in contexts is clever as a visual cue for reviewing your tasks. I found that using font symbols in Things to differentiate “Areas” (like OmniFocus’s folders) was helpful in the same way.
Similarly, using a tag to help you separate areas of responsibility can certainly help you focus by grouping related tasks (and obscuring others). One of the key reasons I preferred Things for a time was the ability to tag actions not just with contexts, but with another bit of data. For example, anything that I might have to submit for school board approval was usually a task I tagged with the @writing tag, but I would also tag it with “Board Agenda.” The action itself wasn’t part of a project dedicated to that month’s agenda, but seeking approval was an important step in completing the project. At a particular time of the month, it was necessary that I was able to see items that had to be submitted to the board secretary. Multiple tags were the best way to get this done, and it was not a true context in GTD.
But OmniFocus has always been flexible, and version three the most flexible to date. You don’t have to be a GTD practitioner to get value out of it. The truth is, so much of what a context once meant–@phone, @computer, @online–is irrelevant now: you can often do any number of tasks no matter where you are (even working from home). This is an interesting take from a recognized power user.