John: when you find that your question is no longer relevant to the
title of the thread you should start a new thread please. But to avoit
being a PITB I will answer these two new questions here.
I do not know any way to see "the action after the next action" or "the
action after that". But if you have clumps of tasks that can be pursued
simultaneously and others that have to be sequential I know how to do
that. Imagine a project with seven tasks, where numbers 2 and 3 can run
in parallel and also numbers 5 and 6 can run in parallel. Dont use "next
actions". Look at an "active actions" view. Set "complete tasks in
order" for the project, then set it up like this:
Project
> Task 1
> Folder 1
> > Task 2
> > Task 3
> Task 4
> Folder 2
> > Task 5
> > Task 6
> Task 7
To remind you of the outcome of your prior discussions on forced next
actions, it would be easy to construct an advanced filter that would
show all tasks where
((NextAction = true) OR (Flag = ForcedNext))
except for one thing; NextAction is not defined as an advanced filter
criterion. You submitted a proposal for this to be implemented, I
supported it, you did not do much cheer leading to try to raise support
from the community, there was not a huge outcry for this feature and so
far no implementation plans have been revealed.
-Dwight
On 12/13/2016 7:04 AM, John . Smith wrote:
Hi Dwight
Wow - I had no idea that all that stuff with the Todo List format,
showing the Task Path was even possible! I learned various things there
- thank you!
Yes that looks useful. But I shall need to digest this properly when I
have more time and revert...
In the meantime I have two other related problems:
A) How can I get to show not just ONE next action within a major project
but THREE?
To explain: I find that quite often the actions within a project are
neither to be executed strictly "in series" nor completely in parallel.
i.e. If I have a large number of actions within a project I don't want
it to overwhelm my view by showing them all, nor to I want to just show
one project because the next 2 or 3 can often be done simultaneously
(i.e. "in parallel").
I am have been assuming that "Next THREE Actions" is probably impossible
in MLO but if anyone out there knows, Dwight would know!
B) Forced Next
I know that this is an 'old chestnut' that has been previously discussed
but I cant remember the conclusion!
But in GTDNext there is an extremely useful featured which they call
"Forced Next" which allows the user to manually put additional tasks
onto the Next (one) Actions view. I have never quite managed to create
some such thing in MLO. The obvious thing to try is to create a flag
called say "ForcedNext", but I don't think there was any way to create a
view that shows NextActions AND Flag="ForcedNext".
Wait, it's coming back to me, now - or was that the intractable problem?!
General point:
Having recently been experimented with competing products I keep coming
back to the same feeling. MLO really is amazing in so many ways. BUT
personally I keep finding that it's like "the monkey's claw", all the
really important things that I want a task management system to do
aren't just difficult, after hours of trying complicated workaround, it
turns out that they all have terrible unwanted side effects that are
worse than the original problem. To me it is clear that MLO has long
ago lost the battle of overwhelming the new users with too many
features, but unfortunately they haven't quite finished job of making it
technically possible to do all the really important things.
J
Dwight wrote:
Hi, John. First, let me say that I am surprised to find you clicking
triangles, I thought that you were keyboard-only. You must have found a
better mount? :-)
I know that there are outliner is which "join rows" is a small deal -
MLO's not one. The only way I know to do what you are asking would be
with cut & paste which is cumbersome and I'm sure wholely unacceptable.
But let's go over why Next Actions isn't working for you. I made a new
profile and put in a half dozen or so tasks at the root and then
added a
folder named HOUSE ORGANISED with the four child tasks you specified. I
created two tabs: the first one showed the All Tasks view, the second
showed Active Actions. The second tab was set to synch selection with
the first tab, and I had the view specifications showing in the left
hand panel. I changed the first filter from ShowActions:Active to
ShowActions:NextAction and saved the updated view as Next Actions. I
created a third tab and loaded the Active Actions view. In
Options:to-do
list format I turned on the top Encode checkbox, turned off encode for
projects, turned on prefix encoding for task path with a path depth of
one, name limit of 20 characters, no start or separator string and enc
string of " - " (blank/dash/blank).
The Next Actions view shows seven tasks, root tasks one through six,
and
one that showed
HOUSE ORGANISED - Clear Bedroom
I marked the House task completed and it changed to
HOUSE ORGANISED - Clear TV Room
the six root tasks were undisturbed
In order to view the other tasks involved in house organization, I have
several choices
1. click on the home tab. To go back, click on the nextactions tab. one
click each way. drawback: if you have a lot of concurrent projects like
this they will all be expended at once. But the one you are working on
will be the selected task so it should not be challenging to find.
2. Doubleclick on the current task. Everything past the initial
click is
identical to option 1
3. Click on the ActiveActions tab. After the initial click it's the
same
as #1. Difference is that #1 gave a hierarchical view which allows you
to see the parents and the completed tasks, also, the view in #1 may
have been sorted which may or may not help.
4. Stay in the current tab. Change the first filter to
ShowActions:Active. When you are done, change it back. Advantage, only
uses a single workspace, if that matters to you. Drawback: two
clicks to
change, And a risk that you are going to leave this expanded without
resetting it and get a surprise the next time you use the view and it
doesn't do what it is supposed to.
5. Stay in the current tab but keep the list of available views in the
left sidebar instead of the view definition. Click on "active actions"
to expand, click on "next actions" to revert. Same as #4 but single
click and without the risk of leaving the view incorrectly defined.
Reviewing your concerns:
- you want to expand in a single click. Of the five ways of expanding
shown above, four are single click.
- you find changing tabs clunky. I don't understand why changing
tabs is
challenging but two of the five methods work in a single tab.
- you experience a slight pain making the parent a project. There
are no
projects here but it would work about the same if you used a project.
- other tasks vanish. No tasks outside of the clean house structure
vanished during this test. The cost of this is that all of your
non-project tasks have to be at root, something that you previously
said
was your intention.
- the parent takes up display space. The parent is not displayed in
this
test unless all of the subtasks are complete.
To your conclusion, it is incredibly simple to prepend a project name
onto its subtasks using the option described above. The challenge is to
do this only for the next action while continuing to display the other
tasks without the prepend. For that I think you have to use cut and
paste
-Dwight
On 12/8/2016 1:32 PM, John . Smith wrote:
>
> Hello
>
> What is the quickest way to join two rows together?
> i.e. I keep wanting to the first child task onto the end of a part
> task's name
>
> e.g. I would want:
> Line 1: HOUSE ORGANISED
> Line 2: - Clear bedroom
>
> to now become:
> Line 1: HOUSE ORGANISED - Clear bedroom
>
> i.e. now all on the one line!
>
>
> *BACKGROUND*
>
> I am in the habit of writing a task in the form:
> [PROJECT NAME] ==> [next action]
>
> e.g. Suppose I had a project like this:
> HOUSE ORGANISED [as a Project]
> - Clear bedroom [as a task with the Project]
> - Clear TV room [as a task with the Project]
> - Clean Kitchen surfaces [as a task with the Project]
> - Clear Kitchen cupboards [as a task with the Project]
>
> Ideally I like to see:
> "HOUSE ORGANISED ==> Clear bedroom"
>
> And then at a single click (on the small triangle before the
project's
> name) I could see all the tasks below it by "un-collapsing" the child
> tasks.
> HOUSE ORGANISED ==> Clear bedroom
> Clear TV room
> Clean Kitchen surfaces
> Clear Kitchen cupboards
>
>
> Yes, I know that I want to see /*just*/ the first task within the
> project, obviously I could use the MLO functionality of "Show Next
> Actions", however there are problems:
>
> 1. I want very quickly (i.e. at a single click) see what all the
other
> tasks within the project are. And in order to to this in MLO
using/not
> using Show Next Actions, I would need to *change workarea* (i.e.
tab).
> And this is rather clunky.
>
> 2. The project name "HOUSE ORGANISED" *must *be made into a MLO
Project
> (e.g. using Alt+J) . This is only a slight pain but...
>
> 3. Any other parent tasks that have not been made into MLO Projects
> simply disappear from the "Show Next Actions" view! Which can be
> extremely confusing.
>
> 4. In any case rather than all being on the one line, it would
then take
> up two lines which wastes precious vertical space: i.e.
> Line 1: HOUSE ORGANISED
> Line 2: - Clear bedroom
> instead of just:
> Line 1: HOUSE ORGANISED - Clear bedroom
>
>
> My conclusion is that in many cases I would prefer to not bother with
> allocating formal MLO Project, and not bother with having to change
> tabs, I would like to have sub-tasks within a task and simply
manually
> append the next task on the list onto the project's name.
>
> But how can I do this in MLO?
>
> Cheers
>
> J
>
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