Next actions, contexts and open/closed

[JJ]

Hello all, I've been using MLO for about a decade and I often get frustrated by the next action list.  For a brief period in the early days the next action list was incredibly accurate and my productivity skyrocketed.  I stopped using MLO for a couple of months and I've since been unable to recapture that bliss.

My preference is to work from three views - what I should be doing right now, what's up for tomorrow, and all tasks/folder view for managing just under 2000 activities. 

At the heart of the problem may be a fundamental misunderstanding on my part of the appropriate use of contexts.  I use them for grouping/categorization, scheduling, and on occasion location.  The precedence of open/closed is causing me heartburn in that Open seems to take precedence over Closed.  For example:

"Make a dentist appointment" has both the Health context and the Business Hours context.  Health hours match all my waking hours, Business Hours are 9-5 on weekdays.  MLO's next action view shows the task based on the Health context and ignores the closed Business Hours context.

A config option for "closed context overrides open context in next action view" would address all my issues, but this doesn't seem to exist.  I've seen other options using multiple context queries but this would be difficult as I have about 50 contexts.

Am I doing something wrong here?  Should I just use the single Business Hours context to work around this or are there other methods that allow me to preserve my attribution?

Thanks all for any assistance.

[Dwight Arthur]

Hi, JJ. MLO is not ignoring your closed Business Hours context. It it filtering out and excluding any task whose open hours do not include NOW, where "open hours" are calculated as the open hours of all contest combined using OR. The config tag that would work for you would be to use AND instead.

The best workaround I've seen is to use contexts only if they involvce open hours and use tags for all other contexts

-Dwight

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[JohnJ]

Hi Dwight, 100% agree, AND vs OR would work; in the meantime I'll give tags a try.  Thanks for your help.

John J.

[JohnJ]

After some messing around with advanced filtering I was able to set up a query that seems to meet my needs.  Effectively:

- (Contexts contains (consider open/closed state) Hours1, Hours2, Hours3, etc. separated by OR...); one for each of the eight open/closed contexts I'm using which all contain the word 'Hours'

- Then another (OR ContextsTexts does not contain Hours) to look at everything else

This filters only the contexts I'm concerned with for open/closed, then pulls in anything else that does not have a specific Hours context.

Cheers

John J.

On Monday, October 18, 2021 at 2:20:11 PM UTC-4 Dwight wrote: