Autocomplete of contexts?

[dske...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

I've been a long-time (10-15y?) of MLO, during which time I've been a poor and loose practioner but firm believer of GTD. I've been transitioning to ToDoist over the past couple of years for a few key reasons:

- Share some projects with my wife / collaborate in one platform

- Autocomplete of context/project name in rapid task entry

- Cloud-sync of calendar to GCal seamlessly from a rapid task entry with time (time boxing/urgency)

- General ability to include context/reference relating to task:

  - Comment support for logging notes/progression of task

  - Include full email with intact hyperlinks in emails forwarded to inboxes/projects

  - Attach photos

- General cross-platform support / future outlook

However, I love MLO and keep switching back for a few reasons:

- Top-down support from goals/dreams, down to 'next action'

- Weekly and Monthly goals, and the way they automatically prioritise/weight to align my next action to my goal (so my next action 'pulls me back' towards my goals)

- Ability to add a next action as a subtask to a task, maybe with a different context, and trusting my focus will be realigned accordingly

- My preference for hierarchical structure of tasks

- iOS app look and feel

- General weighting/prioritisation

- Extreme customisation of filters, etc to select just the actionable tasks (although I don't use them)

In summary - ToDoist has faster workflow (more autocomplete, more context at your fingertips), and MLO has more automated realignment to goals (always the next action).

Has anyone found any hacks/add-ons/workarounds, that would allow me to keep using MLO as my primary, while gaining some of those ToDoIst benefits?

Thanks!

Damian

[Stéph]

Hello Damian. 

I can't answer all of your wishes, but here are a couple:

As far as sharing and collaboration is concerned, I believe you and your wife could collaborate in MLO if you share and sync a file in the MLO (Amazon) Cloud.

For contexts, while there isn't an autocomplete option, there are a couple of options on the desktop version of MLO which are very close to that: 

1. If you go into Tools -> Manage Contexts (or press F8), you'll see in the "Properties" tab that you can assign hotkeys to your frequently-used contexts. 
2. Another option is to assign a hotkey to "select contexts" - I have this set to Alt+Shift+@. When pressing this hotkey combination for a selected task, I get a pop-up window with a checklist of the contexts. I can then start typing the name of a context and selection will jump to that context, pressing the space bar will then tick the checkbox for that context.

As far as cross-platform and cross-app support is concerned, if you keep all your documents in a cloud store, then you can always manually copy and paste web links into a task title or note in MLO. MLO has a lot of flexibility and brilliant custom filtering (as you say), but little automation and little to minimise the number of keystrokes required to set parameters in related information for tasks, so I guess this will always have to be a manual action.

Hope some of that is useful,

Stéphane 

[DamianF]

Thanks Steph!

Yes, the autocomplete is a tricky one to address. Currently I use search in the context list, and it's OK, but just slower than having autocomplete. Another option may be flags, since I don't use these at all at the moment. [Edit: just tried that; the fact that Contexts is available in the shortcut bar under the tasks still makes it faster to use]

As for adding context (history, notes), I was wondering if maybe I could write an iOS shortcut macro to open some other app that can be hyperlinked to a new reference node (I see Notion is popular), so I can add the email/article to the reference, and then create the hyperlink to it and insert the hyperlink in the MLO notes field. The trick is, again, teaching my wife how to use it.

Frustrating! I remembered as writing this that another thing I really like about MLO is inheritance of parent folder properties (date, context). Again, ToDoIst doesn't have this - so subtasks are really almost orphaned; you have to configure each specifically.

D

[Stéph]

Ah yes - I wish that MLO would implement a feature which shone in an old app called Bonsai (search for that word and you'll see me going on and on about  it!), where I could choose how new tasks inherited parameters like dates and contexts from their parents or siblings. It would save so much time when creating new tasks.

Maybe iOS 15 will help with inserting links and shortcuts. I've heard there's some changes coming to make it easier to link and integrate between different apps.

Stéphane