Perspectives for repeating projects

[hypotyposis]

Hey all,

Well, I guess being on the OF Forums at 12.35am gives me a chance to finally use that "kick me" button! Never thought I'd see spam on here...
Now, to the serious business: I'm already discussing this with the Support Ninjas, but I'm wondering whether I might be ignoring some very obvious solution to my problem:
I have a "GTD Daily Review" project that's set to start again one day after completion.
I have a "Do Daily Review" perspective that's set to focus on said project (see attached pic).
What I'm hoping for is that my perspective will display each day the new instance of the Daily review project; instead, it seems to be associated with just one instance, so that it will show only the one it was originally associated with (changing the project filter to "All" reveals the completed instance of the project).
Is there any way to define a perspective to show the current, active, instance of a recurring project? If not, is there a workaround?

Thanks a lot for your help!

[whpalmer4]

Do you need the Daily Review project to repeat? You could instead have a permanent Daily Review project with a repeating action group that holds the guts of what you want done.

[hypotyposis]

whpalmer you're a genius! Thank you so much! So far this looks like it's going to work great. Subsidiary question—is there any way to have a perspective (using the baseline of the settings attached to my previous message) that would show all the available actions for the project in focus but hide the Inbox altogether? Thanks again!

[whpalmer4]

If I understand what you are asking, I think the answer is no. You can however have a perspective that doesn't display the sidebar...that would hide the Inbox at the cost of hiding everything else.

[Ken Case]

If you're only trying to hide the Inbox from your main outline, you can select "Library" in the sidebar and save that selection as part of your perspective.

[hypotyposis]

If you're only trying to hide the Inbox from your main outline, you can select "Library" in the sidebar and save that selection as part of your perspective.

Wow! Thanks Ken! Can't believe I've missed out on that for so long!

FYI (Well, everybody but Ken's), the support Ninjas told me that they've filed the perspective focus not following the current instance of a repeating project as a bug...

[hypotyposis]

Do you need the Daily Review project to repeat? You could instead have a permanent Daily Review project with a repeating action group that holds the guts of what you want done.

Ok, whpalmer, after playing around with this solution, it turns out it really doesn't work out for me (assuming I tried implementing what you meant): I work with my Review projects set in Sequential.
If I switch the actions to repeat instead of the project (Start again...1 day/week after completion), the recurring item is generated immediately after completion of the current instance. That is, once I check the "Get Email Inbox to 0" action (set to repeat one day after completion), tomorrow's action is created automatically. Now, with the perspective I was using in the past, filtering by "Any Status", this was just annoying. But both to get rid of this annoyance and because I realised that I was far more productive if working on my reviews by looking at one (active) task at a time, I tried filtering by "Next Action", which is where the whole thing breaks down.
When filtering by NA, the newly created instance of the task I just checked off blocks the "true" NA from being identified as such, so that the entire action set in my project is grayed out.
If working from a NA filtering perspective, this means once I check off my first action in my repeating cluster, no further action appears.

I'm stumped, especially as I seem to remember that my first time "quitting" OF a year ago was in fact for a similar reason (Things, although it does little else well, actually does the repeating after completion very decently [of course, as long as you don't sync]).

Haven't heard back yet from OG support, and I don't know if there's much they can do aside from fixing the 'tracking current instance of repeating project in perspective's focus' bug; but I'm really quite desperate for support, since I really depend on my daily/weekly review projects, and I've just spent a week re-entering and re-designing my system to be entirely in OF...
Any suggestions will be very much appreciated... More than anything I'm curious how you guys deal with your Daily/Weekly review projects, since I know you have them, and I'm sure they must be repeating? Do you just do it in Planning mode?

Thanks

[whpalmer4]

Yes, it sounds like you misunderstood. You make an action group containing all of the actions you want to do, and set the action group to repeat, not the actions. The next generation of actions is created only after you complete the action group (probably ought to tick the box in the inspector that causes it to auto-complete when all the actions inside are done). I would also put a start date on the repeating action group to hide it until the next day.

[hypotyposis]

Yes, it sounds like you misunderstood. You make an action group containing all of the actions you want to do, and set the action group to repeat, not the actions. The next generation of actions is created only after you complete the action group (probably ought to tick the box in the inspector that causes it to auto-complete when all the actions inside are done). I would also put a start date on the repeating action group to hide it until the next day.

Thanks whpalmer, and sorry for my daftness... And to make sure I'm getting this right, by "action group" do you mean a single action list (the blue box icon) or a task with sub-tasks? [I tried looking in OF's help file thinking this might be standard terminology, but for some reason with the last neaky peek my help file seems to be "broken"]

I see how either could be a workaround; but I'm curious to find out if that's what you guys are actually doing for your review projects: e.g., what perspective does Curt use when doing his morning review (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=51112&postcount=2)? I think it was originally one of the lists he had in OO, since he mentioned using it before Perspectives came to OF, but is he still doing it on OO now? What about you, whpalmer? Are you using a different software to go through "checklists" such as Daily/Weekly Review?

Thanks again for all your help!

[Ken Case]

By "action group" he means a task with subtasks, yes. The parent task is a group, and you can tell it to repeat.

A similar approach would be to put your current repeating project in a folder, and then focus your perspective on the folder rather than the individual project.

Hope this helps!

[malisa]

I seem to remember that my first time "quitting" OF a year ago was in fact for a similar reason


I know that I've quit OF before because I tried to get 'the perfect' solution to repeating actions/groups/projects and either they bombarded me and I got overwhelmed or they did something else (can't recall) and I was numb to them.

I don't think it was any failing on OF's end, I think it was my inconsistency. That being said, when I've re-started it, I've followed Curt's lead based on the post that you quoted and made my routine task in OO documents. I'm a lot happier with OF. (However whenever I try to 'pretty-up' my OO documents I get sidetracked, frustrated, and give up).

I also keep my someday/maybe stuff in OO.

Just .02 from a repeat offender of starting and stopping and starting...

[whpalmer4]

Thanks whpalmer, and sorry for my daftness... And to make sure I'm getting this right, by "action group" do you mean a single action list (the blue box icon) or a task with sub-tasks? [I tried looking in OF's help file thinking this might be standard terminology, but for some reason with the last neaky peek my help file seems to be "broken"]

I see how either could be a workaround; but I'm curious to find out if that's what you guys are actually doing for your review projects: e.g., what perspective does Curt use when doing his morning review (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=51112&postcount=2)? I think it was originally one of the lists he had in OO, since he mentioned using it before Perspectives came to OF, but is he still doing it on OO now? What about you, whpalmer? Are you using a different software to go through "checklists" such as Daily/Weekly Review?

Thanks again for all your help!

Sure, the one day I don't start answering forum posts first thing in the morning, everyone else comes and answers the guy that's asking me a question :-)

Yes, action group is the description the OmniFocus manual uses for what some like to call tasks with sub-tasks.

Personally, I don't use a perspective for running my reviews. I just have a repeating project like the one that bedeviled you, with start and due dates set up such that the actions naturally appear in my Due Soon list first when I initially consult it upon rising. The first task is to review the day's calendar, then my list of urgent tasks (tasks due that day), then my list of "tickler" tasks (tasks with a start date of that day). I do project reviews in the evening, and use a perspective that groups by Next Review to do it. I only review up to the present day (marking each project as reviewed with the Mark Project Reviewed button available for the toolbar), and take advantage of OmniFocus' features for specifying both the next review date and the review interval to spread out the work. I almost never do a "weekly" review where I review all of my projects at once, but everything still gets reviewed regularly. I use a clever idea suggested by Curt Clifton to use prime numbers for the review intervals to avoid having too many reviews coincide. Do a forum search for "prime number review" for more details.

[curt.clifton]

I see how either could be a workaround; but I'm curious to find out if that's what you guys are actually doing for your review projects: e.g., what perspective does Curt use when doing his morning review (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=51112&postcount=2)? I think it was originally one of the lists he had in OO, since he mentioned using it before Perspectives came to OF, but is he still doing it on OO now?

The post to which you linked lists all the perspectives that I use for my reviews. I keep the review checklist in OO. I switch between the listed perspectives in OF to look at my projects and actions in different ways.

[hypotyposis]

Ken, Malisa, Curt, and, last but not least (!), whpalmer: thank you, thank you, thank you, and thank you! (and sorry to be such a n00b)

I've just cycled a couple of daily reviews using Ken's method (creating folders for my repeating projects-I only really have 2 major ones daily/weekly reviews-and focusing on the folder rather than the project), and it works beautifully as a workaround while the bug is being fixed.

Ken's solution was the best for my particular workflow, and I like seeing just one active action at a time (filtering by NA) when I'm working on my review... This "fix" really gives OF its full potential as the app that "hides stuff from you" in a good way!

Thanks also to all for sharing/clarifying your workflows... I've adopted lots of your practices already, and even those that don't fit in my particular implementation are very enlightening: so, as everybody says, thanks Curt and whpalmer for being so generous with your time and teaching!

The workaround and the speed at which it was proposed also fill the last remaining gap for me in making OF the centerpiece of my trusted system: thanks Ken, and all the Support Ninjas/Omni team for not only bringing forward an awesome product, continuing its development with user input, but also and mostly for having the best support of any software company I've encountered so far. (Any chance you guys could take over Axon and/or OriginLab?!? Pretty please?)

Now to describe some parts of my workflow and how it's evolved in response to Curt's and whpalmer's (and others') feedback, just in case anybody's interested:

I've started using OO a lot more. I'm still not a huge fan of outliners–perhaps having to deal with far too many outlines from lectures-but it's really useful for some stuff. I'm going to start playing with the OO-OF import/export a lot more in the near future, too. However, I'm still keeping most stuff out of OO. Part of the reason is that I'm really hoping that with OF's iPad implementation I can just leave my laptop at home and do most of my GTDing on the iPad... So the more stuff that syncs out of the box, the happier I should be (of course, things will change when OO makes it to the iPad).

In OF, I have a dropped folder for templates (checklists mostly, e.g. Trigger lists from DA's books, Travel checklists, Conference planning checklist, etc.), which I classically duplicate and make active as needed.

I have dropped my folder hierarchy completely (I'll go over to another discussion (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?p=79018#post79018) with the also-always-helpful RobTrew about that in a minute), which makes me sooo happy... and allows me (that's just me, though, I can totally see how others would do better with other setups) to do a full weekly review of my projects etc. in the way that I like best... and helps me solve the inconsistency Malisa was mentioning above, of which I am as much a victim as anyone.

I've got a ton of Perspectives (linked to in the action notes of my reviews), though, which help me filter stuff out to be more efficient. I surmise the fact that I never completely engaged with OF the first time round, and came back to it with no particular OO workflow in between, may explain why I'm more reluctant to introduce other software in my workflow than some of you guys who've obviously had full and consistent workflow for a long time.

But I'm still using lots of other software-the tinkerer in me. TaskPaper has my higher-altitude checklists. This had been the case for a while, but recently getting the iPad/iPhone app made it absolutely perfect to use in conjunction with OF for the runway stuff. Actually, I feel that for me, having higher altitude foci completely outside of OF (i.e. not represented by my folder hierarchy anymore) helps me focus on the doing. I use the higher altitude ones, though, during weekly/monthly/etc. reviews to clarify project goals etc.

Reference-wise, I'm again infinitely grateful to Curt for pointing out SimpleNote/Notational Velocity. This is absolutely perfect for all my... simple (text) notes, and the sync is just blazingly fast. I'm using Evernote for anything that's not just a simple text note. I'm still kind of in the market for something in-between: a note app that would allow me to have simple drawings in the note and sync across the 3 platforms, but I don't think it's actually what I'd be happy with (unless I were to use a stylus on the iPad-yes, Steve Jobs: FAIL): OG for iPad is probably the closest to bliss for me in this regard anyway. I'm considering investing in a digital pen eventually as an alternative to notes + graphics app.

Voila for now, thanks again to all for your help!