Thanks, pottster, Dwight, and Lisa. pottster: Thanks a lot for the extra insights regarding keeping old tasks. I never even noticed the "hide completed tasks older than" submenu, so I'll try that. I was concerned about things getting slow or unmanageable, but if you have years' worth of tasks stacked up and haven't had any issues, I think it's worth a shot. I suppose my next question would be whether this also works well on Android.
Dwight: yikes! I hadn't even thought about project progress being messed up by the AutoArchive feature. I had only thought about subtasks of recurring tasks being deleted. I would definitely vote for the changes you suggested, because until those items are fixed, I think there's far too much potential for AutoArchive to screw up my projects and recurring tasks' descendants. Lisa: > You could create a view that shows all completed tasks and delete whichever > ones you want; then you don't have to find them. That's what I do, because > I often don't want to delete everything. I also often delete my completed > tasks as I'm reviewing my outline. This is a good idea, too. I think given Dwight's in-depth discussion on AutoArchive, I should probably steer clear of it for now, and stick to the suggestions you and pottster provided. To clarify, do you mean View>Task Views/Completed by Projects? > I put () in front of the caption anything that will be reset by a recurring > parent or anything I manually reuse frequently. (e.g., return library books > -- doesn't need a template, I just reuse the same task each time). It's > just a visual cue for myself. Thanks, that's a good tip. I could see myself neglecting to keep the visual cue in sync with the task settings on occasion, but maybe I would catch that during a review. One of my friends who uses OmniFocus uses the same type of trick to implement a tag system since OmniFocus doesn't have a tagging feature and only allows a single context to be assigned to a task. > Just to address the Inbox issue, that was a bug in beta software. That's > kind of the nature of using a beta, no? Yes, you did tell me that the <Inbox> having the "hide" flag set by default was a bug. However, the trick to use the Active by Context view and filter by (None) should still be documented in the GTD "case study" on the website. (Speaking of which, it's not really a case study; it's a tutorial. But I don't think it's worth discussing that point in detail...it's just another observation.) > As for the venting, I just think you might want to consider your goals, as > my guess is that you would get a lot more good information and answers from > this group if you approached the product with curiosity rather than making > sweeping assumptions and criticisms (that features are band-aids, poorly > designed, or copied from Outlook for example). Generally, I classify any feature that exhibits unexpected undesirable behavior as a defect. As Dwight has confirmed, AutoArchive has even more detrimental side effects than I suspected. Although many options have been added in an attempt to address the undesirable behavior, they have all failed to address the root cause of the defective behavior--namely, that the AutoArchive paradigm is not an appropriate solution to the problems that this feature is trying to solve. You call AutoArchive's options "features" and I call them "band-aids." I did not call them band-aids in my original post. At best, AutoArchive is confusing and has functionality that overlaps the Backup feature--that's if you don't use projects or recurring tasks with subtasks. At worst, you do use those other features, and AutoArchive will screw up your recurring tasks' subtasks and your project completion statuses unless you take special precautions to use a well-hidden checkbox on each and every project or recurring task with subtasks, to override AutoArchive's undesirable behavior. If it were not poorly designed, then it would not exhibit this undesirable behavior. It would be a disservice to allow new users to think that AutoArchive works as one would expect, so I do think it should be acceptable in this case to cut to the chase and say that AutoArchive is a broken feature. Software developers joke about calling defects "features," but I would hope nobody seriously regards these faulty behaviors as features. For most of this discussion so far, I thought I was going to use AutoArchive and just needed some suggestions on how to set it up correctly, but now I've changed my mind. I think the feature is too broken to use except as a last resort. Criticism is not a purely negative thing. It is one of the forces that drives people to be better. Nobody is perfect, and without criticism, one cannot expect to reach his or her true potential. I certainly could have tried to candy coat this from the start, but I think that only would have lasted for 1 or 2 posts until I started to realize how bad the feature was. I did try to inject some humor by suggesting the developers "banish AutoArchive to the dark realm from whence it came," but I'm beginning to think it would be better in the long run to just get rid of it (or at least hide it from new users who don't specify a special command-line option), if the problems are not likely to ever be fixed. There is some value in trying to appeal to the masses, but-- as Apple has proven with the iPad and iPhone--sometimes it's better to keep it simple and only support a few basic features really well, then gradually improve the product from there. By no means do I love Apple (at heart I'm really a webOS fan), but I have to give them some credit. On Nov 13, 4:49 pm, pottster <[email protected]> wrote: > fwiw... > > I don't use auto-archive either. Don't need to, because: - > > 1. MLO, even after a number of years of accumulating many tasks, still > hasn't slowed down. > 2. My filtering needs are met by Outline>Hide completed tasks>Hide > completed tasks older than (or an advanced filtered view if something more > sophisticated is needed) > 3. It's useful to be able to search a complete history of completed tasks. > 4. I use a separate data file for Projects where I never hide completed. As > said before, true projects, as opposed to simple tasks with subtasks, > usually need full and detailed visibility of what's been completed. > > The nomenclature and functionality of auto-archive is almost certainly a > legacy of the days when MLO was first developed to sync with Outlook. > Unfortunately, MLO is littered with such "ghosts of the past" which might > give an incoherent impression to a newcomer. It's great to have so much > flexibility but it can be a mixed blessing sometimes. I often think, with > more mature software, the way to avoid bloat is a one-in one-out policy. > Might be an interesting twist for User Voice i.e. vote for the least used > functionality - it would provoke some debate I'm sure! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en.
