Hi, John.
A. Fire=>Field. Yes, Cupertino effect.
B. AS=The typo, AS values for you would be A, W, S, L. Or anything else you
chose.
C. When thinking about this I had identified a disadvantage identified as
"can't edit with multiselect" but I forgot to include it in the writeup.
It turns out to be the one that can't be tolerated.
D. I agree with you that Folders provides a good implementation of Area of
Life, so in subsequent discussions I'd like to focus on Action List Status.
E. I believe that when you say "tag" you are talking about the field known
to MLO as "context", is that correct? If so, I totally agree with your
assessment of the disadvantages of using this field for Action.
F. I believe that Flags would be the closest fit for Action, because you
can use hotkeys, they work with multiselect, and they work like radio
buttons in that setting a value clears any previous value. The difficulties
that you describe all seem to fall under inheritance. The thing about
inheritance is that sometimes one wants it and sometimes one doesn't. For
example, if you change a project from Someday to Active but some branches
of the project are Later and a few tasks are Waiting, you would have to
defeat the inheritance.
Workaround: create tasks without paying attention to Action List Status.
Create a view called Action List Status Cleanup showing non-folder
uncompleted items that have no flag, sorted by modified date/time, most
recent first. Find a clump of tasks that all need the same Action,
multiselect them (Windows, select first item, then shift's elect last item
and set the appropriate flag)
I'd like to reaffirm that I would support creation of User Defined Fields,
but that a full implementation including numeric and date fields and
changes to sorting, grouping, advanced filters and, as Pottster mentioned,
database and sync changes, adds up to a long and expensive development effort.
On September 7, 2016 5:35:57 AM "John . Smith" <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Dwight
code a statement in the Notes fire
I take it you mean Notes field, yes? :)
In which case this is sounds remarkably ingenious and I confess that I've
not yet tried that particular workaround.
I think I get the principle which is to burn usual text strings into the
Notes field that one can then use to filter on in dedicated views, using
Advanced filtering, yes?
For completeness okay I get that
"AL=P" would mean "AreaOfLife=Personal"
But please can you explain what these strings would mean in your example:
"AS=A"
"AS=T"
"AS=S"
To recap the main task data fields I want to create (or simulate) would be
*Area
of Life* and "*actionable status*" (with GTD-like list values like: Active,
Waiting, Someday-Maybe, Later )
But wait I have problems with your approach.
What do I do when I want to move an entire project (consisting of say 10 or
20 tasks, and maybe even 2 or 3 sub-projects) from actionable status of
"Active" to "Someday-Maybe" and then on to "Later".
Problems:
1. MLO does not let you edit multiple Notes fields at once. (life is too
short to manually edit each of 20 tasks in a project - nightmare!)
2. And even if MLO could, I may want to use some Notes fields to actually
store notes (!) and i would not want them to be over-written. (Out of
desperation I could live with it but definitely not idea.)
3. When quickly adding a task to a project, I don't really want to have to
add all your manual tagging(s?), it should really default in, by inheriting
its value either its parent task from the task currently immediately above
it in the current view (both methods would work OK)
The two obvious workarounds that I tried for controlling Area of Life and
"actionable status" were
A) Folders and B) Tags, both of which can be made to in effect "inherit".
A task's "Area of Life" is unlikely to change, and I can certainly live
with just one Area of Life per project/task.
As suggested by other users Folders did work quite well for Area of life.
The difficulty was then how do I move projects/tasks between "actionable
status" values?
I didn't want to further clutter up my Tags which I was already using for
Context as well as some other aspects, so I tried putting them into sub
folders as well (i.e. within Area of Life folders). Given the large number
of tasks that I have (400+) this proved to be a nightmare with lots of
clicks and scrolling required just to move between values of say "Active"
and "Someday". Worse because I use position as some sort of informal
relative priority between the different stuff, when physically moving stuff
between folders, the original position is inevitably lost.
Then I tried using Flags for actionable status. At least they can have
hotkeys. But when adding a few tasks into say "Someday", it was a real pain
to have to remember to flag each new task with the "Someday" flag. [ASIDE:
If flags could be set to inherit life would be easier.]
Also it was a slight pain when wanting to change status of an entire
project to remember to manually select the entire project and all it's
tasks before changing it's status flag.
Then I tried using Tags for actionable status. At least they can be set to
inherit and they have hotkeys. But I found the cluttering up of with my
'genuine' tags to be quite irritating. For one thing the tags appear to
care which order they are edited in. And so the more tags you have per task
(and I might have say 2 or 3 real tags & contexts) the more messy it gets
in the view column as the action status could be in any one of 3 or 4
positions, and this means that it's pretty hard to see what it is that you
are looking at!
[ASIDE: If tags could be made to show up in alphabetic short order life
would be easier.]
All in all it's pretty clear that what is needed is a field for each of
Area of Life and actionable status, and they need to default in some
sensible way. But for anyone with a large number of tasks, none of the
workarounds I have yet come across are viable.
J
On Wednesday, September 7, 2016 at 1:16:28 AM UTC+1, Dwight Arthur wrote:
Hi, John. I would like to see User Defined Fields (UDF) in MLO. In fact, I
would like it so much (if it were done correctly<see footnote 1>) that it
would probably rise to about number seven on my wishlist.
-Dwight
*Footnote 1: doing it correctly.* I would not use what you described, as
it's within the range of what I can do with workarounds. <see foornote 2>.
In order to be worthwhile to me four more things would be needed:
(a) in addition to plain text and select from user-defined list, I would
want numeric value, and date/time as available data types.
(b) I would want to know that creation an a new UDF, changes to the
content of a UDF, and changes to the definition/validation of a UDF would
be propagated to all platforms via sync
(c) I would want to be able to test any UDF in an advanced filtter, with
the available tests appropriate to the declared datatype of the UDF
(d) I would want to be able to use any UDF as a paraneter for sorting and
grouping.
*Footnote 2: workaround. *John, with the large number of workarounds you
have tested, it's probable that you have already tested the one I would
use. I wonder, could you point me to a thread where you have described
"horrible" consequences? It would be to code a statement in the Notes fire,
for example AreaOfLife=Personal (or to reduce typing, AL=P). You could then
build custom views showing active personal tasks "((Notes contains AL=P)
and (AS=A))" and you could easily activate someday tasks by overtypoing
AS=S with AS=T. There are multiple drawbacks of this approach versus a UDF
feature, including
(a) Have to remember the coding
(b) Responsible to catch and correct own typos
(c) A dedicated field would be a little easier/faster to edit
(d) these fields unavailable for sorting/grouping
(e) numeric (greater than, less than) and date (two weeks before now)
filters wont work
In my view none of these drawbacks deserves the term "horrible".
-Dwight
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