ForumsGetting Things Done®Projects with no next actions?
Projects with no next actions?
| Author | Message |
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Levi Wallach |
I'm just wondering how people guard against projects that have no next actions? If I check something off within a next action list, I don't necessarily know that it's part of a larger project, or even if I do, I may not have the time to go looking for that project in order to find a new next action. I wish Toodledo had a mechanism to prompt you to specify a new next action for the now next-action-less task, but at the very least it might be nice to create a search that accounted for tasks that had zero (or more than one for that matter) subtasks labeled as next action. There doesn't seem to be a way to do this.
Speaking of such searches, wondering what other ones people have come up with that try to account for potential situations that aren't "legal" based on their implementation of GTD - ie tasks that don't contain status, tasks that have contradicting statuses, etc. |
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Proximo |
During your weekly review, you should be able to catch this and assign your next action as needed.
Not sure how Toodledo would automate this because it's more of a GTD practice. |
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cjuzda |
There are a few programs that allow auto sequencing for projects where when a task is marked "Done", the next task in the project automatically becomes active. this would be a great feature to add
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Levi Wallach |
Actually, I posted this (or something like it) as a support ticket feature request and Toodledo got back to me basically saying that this was essentially "task dependency" and was on their to do list as a planned feature in the future.
In the mean time I was able to figure out how to create a search that among other things finds projects that have no subtasks. The search criteria go like this: is subtask = no and Has subtasks = no and Folder is Projects and Checked off = no This works fine because currently I put my lone-actions (not part of a project) in an "Actions" folder, and my tasks that are part of a project in my "Projects" folder. So far this seems to be the main way I can ferret out such issues. I would love free up folders for some other use, since I find the whole idea that you could potentially have subtasks that are in a different folder from their parent confusing. In any case, it's an extra bit of management that I think gets in the way. The main issue, to me, is that tasks are seen as tasks or subtasks. There's no real way to distinguish a task that doesn't have subtasks (but isn't a project) from a task that doesn't have subtasks but IS a project - that is without adding some workaround like putting it in a folder. If projects were really supported by Toodledo, they would be distinguished in a way. Some people actually used folders as a way to specify projects, but doing so can make things pretty unwieldy if you have (as many people do) a couple dozen, or even more, active projects. |
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robert.lynch |
I know I'm posting on a three-month-old discussion, but this is where my search led me.
I think I'm doing something similar to Levi, where I have a "Projects" folder that has my projects in it. I've built a search that shows me all my unfinished projects that have no subtasks, so I can make sure all my projects have actions. Now I want to build a search that shows me projects that have all their subtasks checked off. If all the subtasks are done, I need to do one of two things: add a new subtask, or check off the project as completed. Can someone help me build that search? |
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Linden |
There isn't any way to do this search right now, unfortunately, since the search criteria can't look at the status of dependent tasks. So, a parent task can't identify whether its subtasks are checked off or if they have a particular status and so forth.
I believe this is something on Toodledo's list of things to implement, though. |
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robert.lynch |
It looks like there's no way to get the result I'm looking for with the folders-as-projects method either. The number of tasks on the folders page includes completed tasks.
I'll just have to troll through my projects one at a time to look for zero incomplete tasks -- which is easier to do with folders as projects rather than tasks as projects. |
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