Weekly Goals ARE inherited - how to turn that off?

[damoski]

Hi folks,

I'm just re-focusing my efforts on using MLO, and am setting my goals
for this week.

However - when I go to the ToDo View and have a custom view by Goals,
I see in my Weekly list, ALL the subtasks as well. This makes the
display cluttered, and I can't focus on the top-level goals. What I
really want to have, is just the main/parent tasks where I've checked
the "Goal" button, but not the subtasks.

I saw from a couple of previous threads in 2008/2011, that the
subtasks would NOT appear in the ToDo list; however, this appears to
have changed. I've checked through all view and menu options, but
can't see anywhere where this might be changed.

For the moment, I'm trying to get around this by making each major
task both a Goal and a Project; I then group by Goal and Project in
the view, and this lets me see each major goal as an expandable task,
with the subtasks underneath it. It works, but it means that extra
'set as project' step when I'm reviewing for the week.

Has anyone else seen this / found a solution?

Cheers!


D

[Lisa Stroyan]

It's parents that don't appear in the todo list, but if you click "Hide the branch in todo" for the tasks you don't want to see, then the parent will show up and the children won't. 

But I wonder if you need to think about how your structure your tasks. The "leaves" are supposed to be your active actions (at least it's easiest to use that way). The parent is the "bigger picture" action which you see when all of the subtasks are done.

I use goals at a lower level because that seems to be the inherent use model in MLO. So, instead of saying "I have 5 goals for my week" I work from the bottom up -- I'd like to complete these specific actions in the next week (ish) -- I may not be able to get the parent task accomplished, but I can have a goal of getting part of it accomplished. 

Goals have always been inherited -- because if you think of the subtasks as part of the parent, then if the parent is a goal, then the children would be too...but if you are using Goals more as Life Goals and not as task goals, I can see where that would be annoying.

You might consider using Contexts for your "Life Goals" usage of Goals, and then define custom views for what you want. I ended up using the Project attribute this way, instead, and I use Goals for narrowing my focus.

Lisa

D

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Lisa Stroyan, mailto: lstr...@gmail.com

[Leigh]

@Lisa,

I'm interested in your use of contexts, the Project attribute, for
bigger goals. Would you mind elaborating on that? I used to use
LifeBalance until recently and use a context called "projects". This
functioned like the Project attribute. I would always struggle with
Long-term goals.

Thanks,
Leigh

> ------------------------------
> Lisa Stroyan, mailto: lstro...@gmail.com <lstro...@gmail.com>

[Leigh]

@Lisa,

I'm interested in your use of contexts, the Project attribute, for
bigger goals. Would you mind elaborating on that? I used to use
LifeBalance until recently and use a context called "projects". This
functioned like the Project attribute. I would always struggle with
Long-term goals.

Thanks,
Leigh

On Apr 1, 6:57 pm, Lisa Stroyan <lstro...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Lisa Stroyan]

I use Contexts as "category/location" similarly to GTD but not very effectively...I need to rework my Context system sometime -- right now it seems all of my tasks are in "@Computer", @Home, and @Phone Calls -- which doesn't narrow the field much, because honestly, 90% of the time I am at home, next to my laptop, with a phone next to me -- so I would like other people's input on that. 

So to narrow my priorities, I've been using Goal plus Starred. Starred is my "working list", and Goals are the things I look through in the morning to create the Starred list.

As for Projects...Let me back up a second and work up from the bottom. GTD (Getting Things Done, which I draw from) has a concept of a project (lowercase P) which is a collection of actions. At first I tried to make all of these have the MLO Project attribute set (isProject=true). But what I found is that it wasn't helpful for me, and I didn't need it -- instead, if I broke down each item into actions and used the parent as both the container and the last, wrapping up step, it works well. So ideally I try to make my initial entry be descriptive of the whole task: "put in a new garden". When I'm ready to think about it, I break it down -- "put in soil", "build retaining wall". Each of those is sometimes broken down -- "call landscaping company to arrange rock delivery".  (To be truthful, they are often broken down only in my head, which is not the most effective, but is reality).  This then "bubbles up" on my task list, first "call landscaping", then when that is finished, "build retaining wall", then "put in new garden" shows up when all else is complete, and it reminds me to tie up any loose ends.  So once the children are complete the container becomes another leaf task, basically. 

Another thing you need to know to understand this system is that my tree is organized by Area of Focus -- AOFs, e.g., Self, Life Maintenance, Career, Family. These are the tops of my tree, everything goes under one of them.

So I thought about what I wanted to use the Project attribute for, mainly based on what views on Android use it, because I can customize the desktop but not Android views. On Android there is a Projects view and Active actions by Project view.  So I decided to use it to show me a list of all my "big rocks", the things I want to focus on. My bigger picture. 

So I made all of my AOFs be Projects, as well as whatever sub-projects/goals I want to have in this big picture view.  E.g., I'm planning a writing retreat for a group of mine. It lives under "Self".  So in my Active by Project list, I have both "Self" (which has all the random tasks under it in that category) as well as "Plan writing retreat"  right under Self (ie, in the right order because the order is tree based). 

Now, when I start thinking about it (which ideally would happen in a weekly review), I'll change it's Goal status to whatever horizon of focus I want, so that it appears in my sorted list of active actions when I'm looking through to select my daily tasks.

I hope that helps...my system is always a work in progress, and it's in no way perfect...in fact it's probably time to tweak it again so I use it more effectively.  

Lisa

[Dwight]

Breaking a complex challenge into a series of steps is a great way to
make it managable. The series of steps needs a container which can be
a project or just a task. When deciding whether to use a project
versus a task, one consideration is the ability to make the item
appear in the project views that Lisa mentions. Another factor, which
I think Lisa alludes to, is that the act of marking the project
complete is a fulfilling and satisfying thing, with a project you have
to add a last step to close the books and have a party.

But I wanted to point out one other consideration. Projects show a
progress bar. It's implemented differently on phone and laptop but its
there. In the simplest form all subtasks count equally in computing
the progress, but if you want to be precise you can adjust the task
effort on desktop to get a more accurately weighted progress bar.
Also, in order to get any value out of the progress bar you have to
mark the project itself as excluded from autoarchiving, or else the
completed tasks are always vanishing and it looks like no progress has
been made.

When I glance at a display of a half-dozen or so projects, I can see
not only their relative importance (where they are in the list) but
also which ones are making progress, which helps make a decision about
what to work on without spending a lot of time analyzing the
situation.



On Apr 3, 1:06 pm, Lisa Stroyan <lstro...@gmail.com> wrote:
. . .