Hi, Riann. I agree with Nick's point but I would like to take it a little further. Just getting your tasks out of the inbox will not end the clutter. You will just be moving the clutter to a different place. If you are not using folders then you will be moving the clotter to the root level, which is not a very good place for clutter.
I have heard several people say that they do not use folders; usually that means that they have not yet figured out how they want to organize their tasks; later on it occurs to them that they could find and manage tasks more effectively if they were organized by some or other principle, and then they discover folders. But if it's not time for you to reach that point, there's no benefit in rushing to it. So for now, let's agree that you want you pending tasks to be stored as an undifferentiated tangle. Why not, as Nick said, just keep them in the inbox? About a third to a half of my tasks are in the inbox. I'm guessing that the issue is that you want to be able to look at just the new stuff and you are looking at the inbox to see the new stuff but that it/x difficult because all the old stuff is mixed in. The answer to this is to ask yourself, how could MLO know which stuff is new? and then build a view that applies that rule, whatever you figured out. The point (for me) of using MLO is to get stuff done and to spend as little time as possible arranging and maintaining tasks. So any sort of regular routine where I am going in and moving stuff around is a drag on my productivity and something to be avoided. I try to touch each task twice, once when I set it up and once when I finish it. A lot of the time I am faced with your fast entry scenario and I dont have time to set the tasks up when I capture them, and then I go to three touches per task: capture, setup, and completion. For me, the issue you are facing comes down to getting a clean look at tasks that have been captured but not set up. Here's how I handle this (there are many other equally valid approaches, maybe you will invent a new one, and you should do whatever makes you the most productive) When I do the setup for a task, I always add a context, based on what event or condition is going to mean that this task is ready to be completed. I may at that time also add dates, dependencies, importance, goals and stars. A task that has been captured but not set up has no context. I am careful never to get a task halfway setup - if it has a context assigned that means that any dates, dependencies etc have also been set up. I have a view called "new" that shows tasks with no context. The task is sorted by modification date ascending, which means that the task that has been sitting on this view the longest is at the top. When I get a chance I take the top task, assign any dates, dependencies, etc, move it to a folder or project if appropriate, and finally assign a context. This is my equivalent of your activation. The task instantly vanishes from the new list and appears on one or more other lists when it's ready to get completed. If I just opened up my inbox and looked into it, it would look cluttered. But my New view and my various To-Do views are pretty much orderly. Does that help? -Dwight On Monday, November 2, 2015 at 6:00:50 PM UTC-5, Nick Clark wrote: > > If you don't use folders(?) why move them out of the Inbox. I don't know > what you mean by "activate" a task, it should be active unless something > like dates prevent this. You can complete them in HD Inbox. > > If you are using folders and want to move a task or even a whole tree of > tasks out of the Inbox to another folder, there are several ways to do > this, but I find the easiest is often Cut (ctrl-X) and Paste (ctrl-V). > > Nick > > -- 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/aae5f6e1-8c0b-415b-bf1d-fe66b509b51d%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
