Next Actions by Context

[Brad Konia]

My workflow involves working primarily by Context, rather than by Project. I don't want to get into a philosophical debate about this, it's just what works best for me. The problem I'm encountering is I'd like to have a view, Next Actions by Context, but the Next Actions filter seems to only apply to projects. Therefore, when I group this by Context, I get multiple next actions within each context.

I'd like to request that the developer add some intelligence to the Next Actions filter. Rather than always grouping Next Actions by Project, the filter should group next actions according to the grouping model within the current view. So if a view is grouped by Context, the Next Actions filter would only show one action within each context.

[Brad Konia]

Another way to approach this would be to get rid of the Next Actions filter entirely and replace it with a Limit Results box in the Grouping window. In this box, the user could enter a number that would limit the number of results from each group. For example, if you entered "1", it would only show the first result from each group, which would be the equivalent of the current Next Actions filter, but would work with any grouping scenario, not just projects. Or you could enter something like "3" to view only the first three results from each group. If you have a long list of items within a group, there may be times when you want to view more than one item, but not necessarily the entire list and this filter would provide that flexibility.

[Lisa Stroyan]

First, I'm not trying to start a philosophical debate...there are so many ways to manage one's tasks and it's very individual. (I'm not a big user of Projects either, for reasons outlined in a recent thread). I'm just talking about what makes the most sense for implementation.

I believe Next Action is a property of a task tree (it doesn't have to be a project), not a property of the grouping or the filter, even though there is a predefined view that uses this property. A next action is a concept from Getting Things Done, defined is the next step that can be taken toward completing a task.

...I just saw your follow-up email and actually that is what I was going to propose. It would be nice in custom filters to allow limiting of results within each grouping (AFTER applying the sort criteria). I would love to be able to do this.

I would not suggest getting rid of Next Actions as a concept as it's pretty key to GTD. Instead, I have commented before that templates should also come with views (and workspaces, now) that support the template structure. In this case I  would move the Next Actions *view* into the GTD template. But right now that is not supported.

Lisa

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Brad Konia <br...@hostland.com> wrote:

My workflow involves working primarily by Context, rather than by Project. I don't want to get into a philosophical debate about this, it's just what works best for me. The problem I'm encountering is I'd like to have a view, Next Actions by Context, but the Next Actions filter seems to only apply to projects. Therefore, when I group this by Context, I get multiple next actions within each context.

I'd like to request that the developer add some intelligence to the Next Actions filter. Rather than always grouping Next Actions by Project, the filter should group next actions according to the grouping model within the current view. So if a view is grouped by Context, the Next Actions filter would only show one action within each context.

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