necessary and sufficient conditions

[tunesmith]

I know this is way too horridly complicated of a feature request to ever implement, but I just have to get it off my chest.

I want necessary and sufficient conditions. Even for cross-project tasks. My main problem is that I'm enabled for way too many actions right now, and it's overwhelming, even with contexts. I want to be able to say that I'm not going to do action 321 from Project 5 until I do action 14 from Project 12. But even more than that, I want to be able to say, "In order to do Z, I have to either do A and B, OR, I have to do F, which I can't do until I do both C and either D or E." Even if they might all be from different projects.

Anyway, you can do all of this - I am firmly convinced that you can represent ANY logical dependency relation between tasks - with necessary and sufficient conditions. You can represent things that you can't even do with Gantt charts, with necessary and sufficient conditions.

[jporten]

I use Waiting contexts to handle this. I.e.:

Check out [some Windows software]
Waiting for reinstallation of Parallels

Then, when reviewing my waiting list, I just check off anything I've already completed in other projects.

[Toadling]

I use a Waiting context, too, similar to jporten. I also sometimes create a "waiting" action to block a sequential project: "Wait for response from John" @john.

You can also do some pretty cool stuff with action groupings with different sequential/parallel modes. For example, suppose you had a series of parallel actions that required the completion of some other single action before they should become available. You can create 2 action groups. Make the first grouping sequential. Inside of it, place your single, blocking action, followed by the second action group, set to parallel and containing the remaining actions.

I also put lots of stuff "On Hold" to trim down my list of active projects and tasks - really anything that I'm not ready or able to work on right now or in the very near future. I've found that more than a dozen or so tasks in any given context just makes my eyes glaze over. I then rely on my daily and weekly reviews to pick up on projects that are ready to be taken back into the "Active" state.