Hi, John. It’s hard for me to give advice here.
Everybody needs to find a way of organizing their tasks that fits their own lives and issues and ways of approaching their tasks – everyone is different and nobody’s way of managing tasks is “wrong” if it works. So I do not want to get into telling you that what you are trying to do is wrong. On the other hand, I can’t follow your choices here. The ability to set up one’s life work of tasks and projects in an outline represents a powerful and flexible way to get your arms around your stuff – to really understand what the big pieces are and how they fit together, what is really important, what makes you busy versus what makes you accomplished. Everybody makes their own choice about how that outline should be structured, and making that choice well is extremely empowering. You are choosing to use it to represent a single simple concept, priority. What makes this more difficult to follow is that there’s already a dedicated field, importance, that tracks this well. This field is manageable with a single mouseclick or about three key-chords, which seems pretty simple and accessible to me. You say that it’s timeconsuming, maybe because what you need is a list of next actions sorted by parent project priority, which I believe is very doable using computed score, but I understand that computed score can get tricky. Anyhow, assuming that your choices to this point are right for you and that the question is how to avoid the warning popup when you manually reorder tasks. Following your description I edited All Tasks to show Filter>General>NextActions and was able to manually reorder projects. I then changed it to Filter>General>Active and I was still able to manually reorder projects. Two guesses about what might be happening to you: 1. The view based on Active Actions you are getting the warning has some other settings that block reordering. Look carefully at all the view properties for All Actions versus the problematic view to see what else is different. Pay particular attention to the SORT section but look at them all. Or, go back to all actions and modify it, one setting at a time, testing manual reordering of projects after each change, until you find the setting that stops manual reordering. 2. When you are dragging individual tasks around, one of the results is that a task that gets dragged outside of the project of which it’s a part is no longer a part of the project and may become a stand-alone task or a part of a different project. MLO might want to prevent you from doing that to your tasks without realizing it while thinking that you are just revising priorities. -Dwight From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Smith Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2014 8:29 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MLO] feature request: sync manual sort of todo list Hi All Let me try another tack and state where I am and how I am trying to use MLO. I am finding that entering individual Importance and Urgency for individual tasks seems to take too long... so I am trying to store the what I will call 'priority' (which roughly speaking I am using to mean a conflation of both Importance and Urgency) by manually moving tasks around within the "Outline > All Tasks" view in MLO Windows. If I move stuff around in MLO Windows, yes the resulting order appears in MLO Android. So far so good. I have also discovered that if I create a view based on Outline > All Tasks but first having changed the filter to be Filter > General > Next Actions, before saving the View in question, not only will this View match the current manually created sort order in Outline > All Tasks, but also I am able to move tasks up and down the page (i.e. changing the order on the page) and have this new order appear whenever I go back to Outline > All Tasks. (And unsurprisingly this new order will appear in MLO Android both things are synced.) This is good too, because it means I can freely change the 'priority' of tasks simply by manually changing the sort order when I am in Filter > General > Next Actions. What seems odd though is that if I create a View using Filter > General > Active (instead of Next Actions), then MLO will not let me move stuff around without the popup appearing. In fact that's not quite true because I can move stuff around within a project, it's just that MLO wont let me move stuff around in the root directory without the warning message. Any thoughts? On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 10:43 PM, Dwight Arthur <[email protected]> wrote: Hi, John. Since I started writing this, there have been good answers to your question from Andrei B and Lisa. I agree with their posts but I think mine goes further, so I’m posting it. I should really edit it to remove the parts the prior posts have already addressed but I’m out of time for this, so I’m sending it with my apologies. Here are several issues that I cannot address, perhaps others can. Look at the end of this post for places where I say “I don’t know”. Thanks. In one of my first posts to you I mentioned the importance of understanding the difference between the order tasks are in when you look at the outliner, versus the order tasks are in when you look at a view that takes a filtered subset of your tasks and sorts them. Your database of tasks is arranged in a tree structure. When you look at the “all tasks” view you see all of your tasks in their outline positions. This does not necessarily have anything to do with the locations of the tasks on disk. Neither is it a sort that has been applied to the tasks. It’s an outline and every task has its place in the outline. The outline is synched across all of your platforms. When you move a task from one position to another in the outline, this is synched and affects the task’s position on all of your other platforms. Try this experiment. Be sure your desktop and mobile are fully synched (I usually do this by synching one to the cloud, then synching the other to the cloud, the synching the first one a second time. Now, disconnect your desktop from the Internet (turn off all wired and wireless connections.) On the desktop, pick a task and move it to a different place on the outline. Now, on the mobile, pick the same task (still in its original position) and move it to a new place different from its original place and also different from where you put it on the desktop. This will create a synch conflict. Synch conflict resolution works well on desktop but not mobile (yet) so we need to sync the mobile first. Sync the mobile to the cloud, making sure that the desktop is still disconnected from the internet. When the mobile sync is done, connect the desktop to the internet and sync to the cloud. You should get a “resolve sync conflict” popup. Find the task that you voved and click on the three dots in the Details column. You will see a Task Difference popup showing the task as it exists on local and remote. If this has all worked, you will see a difference in the coded value used to track the task’s location in the outline. If you are looking at a view that is showing everything in its outline position, you are free to drag any task anywhere at any time, and the change will be permanent across all platforms. I am not 100% sure of this but I think that you are seeing the outline if hierarchical view is enabled and sort is [none] with the manual sort checkbox unchecked. Many useful views are flat views (ie have hierarchy turned off) and some field named in the sort area. These views are known to people who used MLOv3 as to-do views. In these views, the order of the tasks has nothing to do with the position of each task in the outline. If you drag a task to a different position, it is now no longer where it should be according to the selected sort, which is a problem to be solved. Two possible solutions: (1) put the task back where the sort wants it to be, and tell you to stop trying to move it, or (b) decide that you didn’t really want the specified sort, you wanted to be able to move stuff around yourself, so check the “manual sort” box, ignore the other sort parameters, and let you put the tasks wherever you want. Sometimes when you move tasks in a flat view you get a popup asking you if you want to go to manual sort, other times it just quietly turns on manual sort. I’m not sure what determines which will happen. When a view has a manual sort, you can move the tasks around and when you come back you will find them still in the same order. I hardly ever use manual sort so I don’t know whether or not the revised order persists only in one workspace or whether it will appear when you open the same view in a different workspace. I also don’t know whether or not saving a view will help. I do know that if you have several workspaces and each workspace contains a different manually sorted view, you can sort each workspace differently and they will all persist separately. In other words, it is not true that there is only one manual sort, there can be many. I have read several people saying that the manual sort in the active starred view gets synched to mobile, so it must be true. I know that there are other views that use manual sort on the desktop, do any of them also exist on mobile and if so, does the manual sort sync for them as well? I don’t know. Even more interesting, on the current IOS release you can export a view from desktop and import it on your iPhone or iPad. If you create a new manually sorted view on desktop and export it for import on ios, will the sort order for this new view get synched? Again I don’t know. -Dwight -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. 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To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/CAEN65JY4e6NSK2GNNGHOdEv_h-kimX0ejAEcP7Beesd57oQ_%3DQ%40mail.gmail.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/CAEN65JY4e6NSK2GNNGHOdEv_h-kimX0ejAEcP7Beesd57oQ_%3DQ%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/003c01d01d3e%241bd9f0b0%24538dd210%24%40dwightarthur.us. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
