5.2.2 TODO keywords as types

The second possibility is to use TODO keywords to indicate different types of action items. For example, you might want to indicate that items are for “work” or “home”. If you are into David Allen's Getting Things DONE, you might want to use todo types `NEXTACTION', `WAITING', `MAYBE'. Or, when you work with several people on a single project, you might want to assign action items directly to persons, by using their names as TODO keywords. This would be set up like this:

     (setq org-todo-keywords '("Fred" "Sara" "Lucy" "Mike" "DONE")
           org-todo-interpretation 'type)

In this case, different keywords do not indicate a sequence, but rather different types. So it is normally not useful to change from one type to another. Therefore, in this case the behavior of the command C-c C-t is changed slightly¹. When used several times in succession, it will still cycle through all names. But when you return to the item after some time and execute C-c C-t again, it will switch from each name directly to DONE. Use prefix arguments or completion to quickly select a specific name. You can also review the items of a specific TODO type in a sparse tree by using a numeric prefix to C-c C-v. For example, to see all things Lucy has to do, you would use C-3 C-c C-v. To collect Lucy's items from all agenda files into a single buffer, you would use the prefix arg as well when creating the global todo list: C-3 C-c t.