True. You previously stated that you found folders to be a waste of time
so I was assuming that you would have lots of standalone tasks at the
root. If that no longer applies, I would suggest forgetting about next
actions, and setting all of the projects or folders where you want to
see next actions as "complete tasks in order"
-Dwight
On 12/13/2016 12:53 PM, John . Smith wrote:
PS
Dwight I have found a major flaw in your proposal, for using Next
Actions which is that what you suggest only works in the /root/
directory. Whereas I am using a different folder for each of my Areas of
Life. The problem is that the Next Actions view in MLO hides all
stand-alone tasks. And MLO fails to treat tasks that are within a Folder
as if they were in the root directory.
The only workaround I can find is to manually make all my standalone
task become "Projects"! (This is slightly painful to remember to hit
Alt/J for every standalone task...).
Obviously if you make everything in sight into a Project, then the Next
Action view simply would simply shows everything in sight! So in order
to just have only the /genuine/ next actions within each project become
visible in the Next Actions view, I would need to make sure that all
actions within a project are NOT be flagged-up as being also Projects.
This would be possible. Although given that I like to move stuff rather
fluidly between projects and actions this wouldn't be ideal.
J
On the up-side I guess I could manually flag any actions up as being
"Forced Next" actions (see my previous comment) simply by making any
action I wanted to see on the the Next Actions list become a project
(e.g. using Alt/J)
On Tuesday, December 13, 2016 at 12:04:28 PM UTC, 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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