Hi, Ayershale. Thanks for the information and sorry for my delay in responding.
I agree with you that it would be better if the delayed archiving feature would be a user-selectable option. I would suggest that by default delayed archiving should be enabled because this prevents unpleasant surprises that are hard to repair. People who understand what’s happening should be able to select which way they want this to happen. But I suspect that this change may not happen any time soon, so let’s talk a little more about a possible workaround. I certainly see how you are using MLO to track your work, and I can see that delayed archiving of tasks has no benefit and some detriment for you. I’m not yet real clear on why you want to group your tasks into projects rather than folders. If you took one of your projects and cleared the “this is a project” checkbox and instead checked the “Folder” checkbox the following changes would happen: 1. Archiving of completed tasks would no longer be deferred – good, that’s something you are seeking 2. No more percent complete – okay, because you are not using that 3. No more progress bar – okay because you are not using that 4. Ability to zoom in – unchanged 5. Ability to dedicate a tab to the zoomed-in view – unchanged So what’s the negative to changing projects into folders? I suspect it has something to do with the part of your message where you say: By designating projects as a 'project' , it also allows me to set up a dedicated tab that only displays the parent project title I’m not sure that I exactly understand your point. I could read this as the ability to create a zoomed in view of a project and lock a tab to that view, so the project name is on the tab and the tab displays the project’s remaining tasks. I strongly believe that the exact same thing can be done with folders: create a view that zooms in to a folder, then create a tab locked to that view. Or you might be saying that you want a tab which shows a list of project titles. You can also easily create a view of folder titles but it will include extraneous folder titles like “<Inbox>”. In order to see just the former project names in a view you would need to create some condition that’s true for all of them. For example, you could include some context on all of them. Or you could set some flag on all of them. Or start them all with the prefix :PRJ. Then you would have to create a custom view that shows all folder names where the folder has subtasks and the folder meets your specified condition. This is a little more work but I don’t think it’s too much Please write back and let me know if I came close. Thanks. -Dwight _____ From: mlo_user_08 <[email protected]> Sent: Tue Apr 30 11:43:59 EDT 2013 To: [email protected] Subject: [MLO] Re: Change: Archiving old completed tasks will not archive the subtasks from open Projects... Hi Dwight, See below... hope this provides a little more depth as such... I’m guessing that you are not a user of repeating tasks with subtasks. You described your interests being focused on what’s to come and that you have little interest in what has been done. With repeating tasks, your past tasks become your future tasks and cannot easily be dismissed. This does not sound like you. I use a dedicated section for recurring actions-- which, as you describe, don't have any subtasks. This makes it easier to track the discrete one-off actions from the recurring actions, either in the context of @work or @home. So I’m guessing that you have a lot of tasks that are organized as projects. Because if you don’t have subtasks of repeating tasks and you don’t have tasks in projects, this change does not affect you. For me, many of the things about projects require tasks completed early to stick around into the later phases of the project. For example, you can’t compute a meaningful progress bar or percent complete if the early tasks have been archived. So I’m wondering what you get out of organizing your tasks as projects. Would you mind describing how you use the projects, and what you get out of them that you wouldn’t get from, say, a folder full of tasks. Sort of correct: I have a lot of projects that are organized as projects (building and organizing desk from the ground up (building organzing extensive wall desk, complicated home improvement projects that require a good deal of sub-sections to effectively track what's going on where...), with a good deal of discrete, non-repeating tasks. Once the task is done, I'm never doing it again. For my purposes, I really have no reason to 'track' progress on the project since it's not so much a function of how far along I am (I don't need to track for billing purposes, for example) but rather how much do I have left to complete, what's left on the plate that needs to be done, so I can strike the project knowing the hundreds-- quite possibly thousands (been working on this desk for over a year...) of discrete actions are completed in total before moving on to the next project. By designating projects as a 'project' , it also allows me to set up a dedicated tab that only displays the parent project title which makes it infinitely easier to review projects by upcoming time frame, as well as annual planning to determine which projects get the green light and which ones can be deferred. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. 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