HeyScottyJ:

The more I thought about Tags, the more I also thought that Tags, for me, are not a criteria, they’re a list. In other words, my actual usage of OmniFocus taught me that what I really want to see are lists. And yes, one can build all kinds of amazing and capable advanced perspectives in OmniFocus 3, but more often, I’m clicking a Tag to show me all the Email I need to write, or all the things that concern Susan.

This comports neatly with my desire for tags in OmniFocus back when Things 2 had them, and OmniFocus 2 was religious about one context per action.

Me, back in 2016:

Friction in OmniFocus, for me, came from the context limitation: you can only assign one context to a task. This makes perfect sense in terms of the action required to complete a task (Is it a phone call? Is it writing? Am I waiting?). It makes less sense, though, because the modern nature of work is different than it used to be. Yes, some things I can only do at the office, but I can pretty much write anywhere, email anywhere, and read anywhere. Tags like “@online” don’t mean what they used to, when you had an internet connection in one place, on one computer, on your desk. I can be online just about all the time now.

With Things, you can make tags function as contexts, but you can assign as many as you like. For example, I meet with my director once a month on Thursday formally, so I will tag agenda items with “Thursday Meetings” and her name, so that if I find myself in a situation where I have her time and attention, I can jump ahead and discuss the issue, well before before the meeting. Likewise, I will tag items with an administrator’s name and the school they work in, so that I can bring up the item if they call me, or I find myself in their office; if I’m in the building, however, and want to see what I business I have in the school itself, I can see that task associated with the building, not only as dependent upon the administrator.

Another clever use of this might be to tag an item you need to pick up as an “@errand” and also tag it as “groceries” or “hardware store” or another specific location. In OmniFocus, you otherwise get into creating subtasks of a context, which isn’t terrible if the relationship is parent/child (i.e. errands > pharmacy), but it doesn’t work for parallel relationships (a principal isn’t necessary bound to the building–you could email or talk by phone–nor is a building bound to a person).

OmniFocus 3 Tags are Lists