Thoughts on using MLO with Mark Forster's systems

[Laurence Glazier]

Can someone advise on the best way to achieve using Mark Forster's methods in MLO? This usually involves moving a task to the bottom of a list. To achieve this I am using the Active Starred view. This is because manual orders in other views generally do not sync in the new Android version. (Are there plans to change this?)

I am operating more flexibly than Mark Forster described, creating Active Actions lists only of areas relevant at a particular time; the other areas get hidden. Generally I am seeing tasks from 2, 3 or 4 visible sub-branches. At root level I have a "Hidden" branch where I put the irrelevant sub-branches (e.g. "Home" while I am at work), and an "In Progress" visible branch where I have relevant and priority sub-branches. I move the main sub-branches back and forth between these primary ones during the day to generate relevant active task lists.

While my approach technically works, there are overheads. Because only the Active Starred view syncs active actions with a manual order, I have to ensure every active action is starred, which means I can no longer use the star for the purpose intended. In the FVP system (Final Version Perfected) a chain of tasks is established. Without access to the stars, I tried showing the tasks in bold face (Ctrl-B) but that works only in Windows and does not transfer to the Android. The best I have found so far is to identify the chain of tasks visually by setting them to be projects (they then show in blue on the desktop, and are underlined in blue on the phone). But this is another overhead in terms of keystrokes, and undermines the use of projects as projects. A similar way it make the tasks overdue, but that has similar issues.

Is there some way I should be using flags and contexts to achieve my approach with lower or no overhead? Is there some clever technique with views I should know (bearing in mind they need to have manual sort to that tasks can be moved to the bottom)? Should I consider abandoning the Windows version for serious work and instead treat it as a resource for occasional manipulation of tasks in bulk (with the multiple selection facility)?

Thanks for reading to the end!

Laurence

[Nick Clark]

I don't know the methodology you refer to, but have you tried "playing" with the Importance and Urgency sliders in an Active Actions view? These coupled with Context filters and context active times may achieve most of what you describe.

[Laurence Glazier]

Thanks Nick, I will try that out.

[Dwight Arthur]

Hi, Laurence.
I  can't comment too far because I don't know anything about the Forster methodology but I have some advice about effective use of MLO.


One of the challenges with any task manager is to ensure that the productivity gains outweigh the time you spend managing and tweaking the tool. It seems to me that the time you spend manually reordering your tasks would be a problem and I  would want to find a way to let MLO do that for me.


First, you need to be clear on the difference between actually reordering the tasks in your outline, versus re-sorting the order in which they appear in a view. One of the most compelling advantages of MLO is the availability of powerful tools for defining views. If you can define a view that shows the tasks in the order you want then you dont have to re-order the outline. This involves coming up with some sort of a of rule that describes the order you want for your tasks.


The starred view is an exception; it handles the case where your rules put some task low in your list but you know that it has to be done right away, so you tick the star. Since we are already looking at situations that are exceptions to the rules, you can't write a rule to put these exceptions into an order, so you often have to use a manual sort,  and for this view (only) MLO synchs the manual order between platforms. But if you are starring and manually sorting all of  your tasks it would seem that you are underutilizing the power of MLO.


You made several mentions of moving something to the bottom of the list. I use a FIFO queue for this type of thing. Create a view that includes all the tasks that you want to see but maybe in the wrong order. Then sort the view in ascending order by date modified. The tasks that have been in the queue the longest will be at the top. Whenever a new task becomes included it should appear at the bottom. If a task that's at the top or in the middle needs to go to the bottom, just make a change to it. For example,  add a blankspace to the end of the title. This causes the modified date to reset to "now" and your task instantly sinks to the bottom of the view.


Similarly, instead of dragging your work folder to a hidden branch when work ends, how about finding a way that MLP can tell whether you are working and adjust automatically. One way to do this is by scheduling it. In the Hours tab of the context definition for the @work context, set up the hours of each day of the week that you are normally working. Your tasks with the context @work will appear on your task list each workday morning and go hidden each workday evening. You can define an @home context that's open whenever @work is closed.


Another approach would be to do it by location. Associate your @work context with the location of your workplace and do the same with your home, then use the Nearby view. Windows doesn't support Nearby yet but I dont find that a problem. I mainly use MLO/Windows for planning and organizing my tasks, where my current location doesn't really matter much, and i use my phone for when i am working on my tasks.


Read the secton of the mlo users guide that gives the seven or so ways that a task can be inactive and look for ways to make your tasks active only when it is time to work on each one.


One more small point.  You mentioned that projects are underlined in blue on the phone. That blue line is actually a progress bar.
-Dwight
MLO Betazoid on Android SGN4

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[Stephen Jones]

Laurence,

There have been some previous discussions about this topic. Try this topic or just do a search on Mark Forster.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/mylifeorganized/mark$20forster/mylifeorganized/LDLD05dkR0w/TuldWWa-OvQJ

Cheers 

Stephen J

[Laurence Glazier]

Thanks Dwight.

Today I have been trying out Nick's idea of adjusting the importance and urgency, it's good I got some practice with that, it might work, at least it means the stars can be used as stars.

Mark Forster has changed his systems over the years, and I want to share a link here to his latest, I think it is quite interesting. He always says his latest version is the final one. He calls this one FPV, Final Version Perfected.

It involves marking a selection of tasks in a list, called a chain, and working through them. It's a psychological trick which means you are always working on something you prefer to do, he calls it relative procrastination. The problem is that marking a task in MLO in any way changes the Date-modified, which would change the order in the sorted view you suggest. I did consider sorting on Date-Created, but although it can be altered in Windows it cannot be edited on Android. I tried Review-date but that didn't work well either.

When a task has been worked on (or a new one placed on the list), it is moved to the bottom. That's what I find tricky. Sorting by Date-modified would mean the chain of selected tasks would no longer be apparent.

I absolutely want to work in harmony with MLO's design. It is my best option even if I have to force manual sorting by adjusting importance/urgency sliders, or work only in Starred views.

I'm also looking out for mathematically equivalent ways of achieving Mark Forster's structure which do not require a manual order, which is partly a consequence of his insistence on using pen-and-paper systems.

Laurence

[Laurence Glazier]

Thanks Stephen

I've searched, but Mark Forster has moved on since AutoFocus and his latest methods require manual repositioning of tasks - so far I haven't found an easy solution. Here's a link to his latest method: Final Version Perfected. I've been using his systems on and off for many years, and his more recent iterations have had similar issues in usage with MLO. But now that some Android bugs are resolved with the new version, and dependencies and list editing are in the app, I have been trying more seriously to use MLO for FPV, or maybe ASEM (his previous system which I also like.)

Laurence

[Dwight Arthur]

*maybe* I could suggest something but first I need to see if I am understanding you. When you have built a chain of projects do you always work on the first item in a chain or does relative procrastination involve skipping to the second or third task?

-Dwight
MLO Betazoid on Windows, Cloud and Android SGN2

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[Laurence Glazier]

Sounds intriguing!

As I understand it, each successive activity in the chain is more desirable (or less undesirable) than the preceding one. The last one in the chain is always the preferred one from the entire list. You work on that one. If you leave it unfinished, you remove it from the chain (unflag/unstar/unmark it somehow) and transfer it to the bottom of the list.

The next one to work with is what was the previous one in the chain, unless the chain can be extended further down again with more desirable ones.

If and when you get back to the top item, when that has been worked on you start a new chain again from the top.

It takes a bit of getting used to.

[Dwight Arthur]

Thanks for the link to FVP, it was an interesting read. I had been going to suggest something about using dependencies to form tasks into a chain but its clear that this would not help manage FVP.

If I wanted to do this: I would use Importance. I would start by multiselecting all of the tasks in a chain and setting importance to zero. Then, whenever I want to put an FVP "dot" on a task I would up the importance by one

 - <alt>2, <alt>2, tab, right-arrow

 - if <general> section in task properties is collapsed, only one <alt>tab is needed

The next task I wanted to dot, I would set importance to two. Same hotkey sequence except two taps on the right-arrow key.

somewhere around ten I would stop counting taps and just hold down the right arrow key until importance gets into the neighborhood, then use right arrow or left arrow to fine-tune it.

If the last task I dotted got importance 27 and I need to add a new task, I would add it with importance 28 and the next task dotted would be 29.

I would work from a view that zoomed to a particular folder and displayed tasks sorted in order on ascending importance. Each folder has its own sequence of importance values and you have to remember the current value so that you can assign a value one higher to the next dotted or added task.

Do you want to use FVP to select which task to do next across multiple folders? If so then the view should include all of the candidate folders and they should share a single sequence of importance values

drawbacks of this method:

1. you need to use your own memory to track the next importance value for each chain. That, or else check the bottom of the view every time.
2. If you use the contents of different folders together in varying combinations you will need to assign a single string of importance numbers across folders
3. I suppose that every once in a while the rankings get stale and the piece of paper gets messy and you start over with a fresh sheet, right? The equivalent of this would be setting importance for all tasks back to zero. If you have more than 200 dotted or new tasks between resets you will run out of importance values. In that case I would set urgency for all affected tasks to zero at the reset as well, and after assigning importance number 200 to some task the next task would get urgency 1 and importance one, then urgency one and importance two and so on up to urgency one and importance two hundred, then urgency two and importance one and so on. By the time you get to urgency 200 and importance 200 you will have dotted 40,000 tasks which I think would be more than enough. Your view would then be sorted by urgency ascending and then importance ascending, next task at the bottom. This allows you longer lists but it's more complex and more to remember
4. Mobile: the lists and views will synch well and display well, but it could be terribly difficult on Android (and, I assume, iPhone) to assign an importance value of 7 (not 6 or 8) to a task. There's a slider that could be used but you would need a stylus to make fine-tuning adjustments and there's no confirmation of what number the slider is set to. So in my opinion you would need to analyze your queue and decide what you want to work on, on Windows and you could use mobile platforms to tick off completed tasks, capture new tasks, and have a peek at what's pending.
5. when a view gets longer than what fits on one page I could have trouble doing this. But I guess that drawback applies when doing it on paper as well.

[Laurence Glazier]

Thanks Dwight

I will try something like that for the time being, and see how well it works for me. I can revert to using Active Starred view, and starring every task, which works though does not make the application shine!

If there is a solution we have both overlooked, I suspect it is in outline based views rather than to-do list ones. It may be that synchronizing other manually ordered views will be needed to solve this one. And by then Mark Forster may well have come up with new refinements to his methods!

Laurence

[Dwight Arthur]

You mention an important point. In a to-do list view, the included tasks are shown in a flat list either ordered according to a defined set of sort rules or else ordered according to a manual sort.

Outline views in contrast show the included tasks in a hierarchical list. Most of the time, the entire view is ordered according to the order the tasks are in within the underlying profile. If you specify a sort rule in a hierarchical view, it will be used to sort the top level items; tasks in the branch below each top level item are unsorted, that is they are in the order of the underlying profile outline. So if you re-order tasks within a folder, you are actually reorganizing the underlying outline, and these changes will be synched.

You can build custom hierarchical views that zoom in to a particular branch, or that exclude any item whose contexts are all closed, or limit the display to active tasks (ie not hidden, no future start date, etc). Maybe something like this would serve you better.

-Dwight
MLO Betazoid on Windows, Cloud and Android SGN2

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[Laurence Glazier]

Thanks Dwight I might choose the path of outline based views. For the moment I have been tweaking the importance slider but I can see this may get harder as time goes on!

I tried a different approach today, by using the Active by Context view. To move a task to the bottom of the list, I would set a context based on a date stamp, e.g. 151219/1 etc, which effectively puts it to the bottom of the list. In time, as these contexts become emptied, they would be deleted. However the synchronisation from Windows to Android did not work well. Tasks without contexts did not always show on the Android, but sometimes did. By creating a new context and putting all items without a context into it (called "New None") seemed to fix it. I may persevere with this idea for a while.

I need to understand this aspect of MLO better. Even if it does not solve the immediate issue it is bound to help me in the future :)

I might pose these questions, with a link to this thread, on a similar forum on Mark Forster's website which I think may have a number of MLO users.  

Laurence

[Laurence Glazier]

A quick update. Using contexts seems to work quite well. One problem you may be able to advise on. I ascribed the context "New none" to the Inbox, and all tasks I inbox in Windows automatically get this context, but on Android, whether I use the widget or the app to inbox intems, the context is not set, so I have to do it by editing. Is there an Android setting to make this automatic?

I have just made a query about these issues on Mark Forster's website at 

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final-version-perfected-fvp.html?postSubmitted=true&currentPage=3#comments

[Lisa]

In case no-one has mentioned it, I believe the "Alternative Complete" was added to support moving a task to the bottom of a manually sorted list for this method. (I don't use it and haven't read all the discussion but wanted to make sure you knew about it).

 

Lisa /  lstr...@gmail.com

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[Dwight Arthur]

Laurence, on my Samsung Note 4 running Android 5.1.1 and MLO 2.0.14 new tasks added to the inbox inherit the context of the inbox folder. I have tried adjusting settings that seem as though they might have an impact but no matter what i do the inheritance continues to occur. I have no idea why it is not happening for you and I would suggest that you write to sup...@mylifeorganized.net

-Dwight
MLO Betazoid on Android SGN4

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[Laurence Glazier]

Thanks Lisa, I knew about this, it was encouraging to find it out. But the sort order is lost on sync to the Android, unless we use Starred view. I think it was intended for use in single outline branches, where order gets synced, but if we combine multiple branches and view as active actions, it is getting more complex.

But yes very useful in Windows in the Outline view!

Laurence

[Laurence Glazier]

That's strange, Dwight, I am using the same handset, a Note 4. I will look at this more closely and see if I can fix it before contacting support.

[Lisa Stroyan]

Ah, gotcha. I've been only working out of active starred on Android as far as manually sorted views.  So importing a manually sorted view doesn't sync sort order?, that's too bad. (And I don't think alt complete is on Android anyway).

[Laurence Glazier]

Update - I found that if I set the context for Inbox on the Android device, new items added inherit it.

[Dwight Arthur]

Is there any chance that you have more than one inbox?

-Dwight
MLO Betazoid on Android SGN4

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/b2fe39bf-9de5-4f60-bfe3-0e16c3b592a9%40googlegroups.com.

[Laurence Glazier]

I have made that mistake once, but not this time. Only one Inbox!

I have decided to look at the manual sync issues positively. I'll limit my use of Mark Forster's systems to the Android, and view that as a bonus facility which comes with the Android platform. I always have my phone with me and the Windows version is very useful for inboxing and multiple-select operations.

That way I can enjoy all the benefits and look-and-feel of the Android app without trying to manipulate it with extra contexts/stars/sorting tricks! Thanks so much for all your time and suggestions. :))

Laurence

[Lisa Stroyan]

What is the solution you ended up with on Android? Manually ordered list? Do you pull from across the task tree or are you working in the outline? Just curious!

Lisa

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Lisa

[Laurence Glazier]

Hi Lisa

I made a view called FVP (the name of Mark Forster's latest system), and I keep this view only on Android. It is defined very simply, based on To-Do rather than Outline, no filter, no grouping, and manual-ordering. I specify the chain of tasks as he suggests by starring them, and work backwards through the chain. After finishing working on an item I delete it if finished, or drag it to the bottom of the list and remove the star. Of course it's a bit more complex than that, but that's it in a nutshell.

And yes, I pull from across the outline. I have a primary branch called In progress, and I drag active roles into it, or from it to a hidden branch, often several times during the day (it's quicker than on-the-fly hiding and showing branches); this determines which tasks show up in the to-do lists and therefore in FVP. I zoom in sometimes for focus. But I follow the FVP principles whatever shows up in the list.

All the best

Laurence
www.laurenceglazier.com

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[Laurence Glazier]

I have since discovered the link I gave sees no action. All the discussion appears to be here: http://markforster.squarespace.com/fv-forum/ - as I expected would happen, Mark Forster is already trying to improve on his FVP, "Final Version Perfected".

Laurence

[Dwight Arthur]

Sorry,but it sounds a little bit like the singer Cher, who is wrapping up part two of her four year long "Final Goodbye Tour" sequel to her "goodbye tour".

-Dwight
MLO Betazoid on Windows, Cloud and Android SGN2

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[Laurence Glazier]

It would seem so, but he is trying to solve a problem that may have no end, and is not hoping to relive the past. He more or less shares his models freely. But it is a major issue that he will only make systems that can be done with paper and pencil, which thereby misses all the outlining and filtering possibilities of apps like MLO, so we need to adapt his ideas (and I believe improve upon them) judiciously.

The lack of full synchronization of manually ordered lists is a continuing issue (I don't know when it will come), but I have found an interim solution with the Vysor Chrome app which, with some care, allows me to have the Android app (and the entire phone) in a window on the desktop, with copy and paste available with Windows apps.

Laurence

[Laurence Glazier]

The solution I came up with for moving tasks to the bottom in a list that synchronizes between phone and PC, is to sort on Created Date. Set the Created Date to Now to move any task to the bottom. (It is quick to do this, toggling the Use Time control sets the time to now,)

This method works in custom views and the standard Goals, Projects and Review ones (just the sort order needs to be changed.)

Laurence