Hello John, I think that MLO has enough optional parameters and advanced filter functions to be able to do what you want in more than one way.
Firstly, I'll say that what I understand to be your need gies beyond what a plain vanilla (paper-based) GTD system would give you. In GTD, you write down youir projects and then you write down only your next actions for thise projects - ie all the tasks you write down are next actions and apoear on your lists, but the lists are kept short by splitting into contexts and only recording your next actions. You're then supposed to review your projects regularly, to identify the next, next actions. You (and I) want to plan ahead, though, writing down the subsequent actions and then filtering them out until you're ready to do them. You say that the next actions could be three or four of the tasks in each project. Without having a formula for which of the tasks these are, though, it's going to HAVE to involve a manual process to identify them. So, the key is to find the quickest, most efficient way of doing this, on a regular basis: Personally, I never use the option to "complete subtasks in sequence". That has the limitations you've already identidfied. So, options in MLO for tagging the next actions include: • Setting the start date to some time in the future - though this takes a bit of typing for each task (or each group of tasks if you're on the desktop and select multiple tasks to edit their dates at the same time). Also it needs manual input whenever project dates change (which happens a lot, with my poor skills at time estimating); in fact, GTD discourages you from setting dates where you don't have to, simply because we all tend to be over-optimistic with dates, the tasks then tend to back up and you can end up overwhelmed with overdue tasks. • Using a context (I have a context called @pending, but I've found that doesn't work well for me); • Using flags - though these are only available to set on the desktop version of MLO; • Using STAR to mark all the actions you're ready to focus on - My favourite option. Unless you're using the STAR for something else, this is the quickest parameter to use, on both the mobile and desktop platforms. Ther's a hotkey for it on the desktop and you can select multiple tasks and toggle the star on them together. So, I'd recommend trying out that last methodology, to see if it works fo you, too. Remember, though, MLO doesn't offer much automation of task status (eg you can't choose to have contexts replace each other, project status isn't automatically updated by completing all the tasks in you project, etc) - There's no way of automating your way out of doing a weekly review to identify your next actions. Hope I haven't misunderstood your need and that this is relevant and helpful. Stéphane -- 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/74358c95-b7dc-40b0-a441-4b6d596bbf29%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
