View all actions with empty context
 

Hi,

I've discovered lately that I have quite a lot of actions without any context. When working from project outline I often forgot to assign a context to an action....
But I can't find a way to view all actions that don't have context. Any hints?

thanx
Ksenia

I'm a little confused, if you're working from a project view anyway, why do you need to view actions without a context? They must be assigned to a project or they'd still be stuck in your inbox. And if you're working from the project, you can still see them, provided you are filtering to see all actions, since contextless actions aren't considered available.

Great suggestion! My vote for viewing tasks with no context to allow me to easily filter and assign.

[QUOTE=GeekLady]I'm a little confused, if you're working from a project view anyway, why do you need to view actions without a context? They must be assigned to a project or they'd still be stuck in your inbox. And if you're working from the project, you can still see them, provided you are filtering to see all actions, since contextless actions aren't considered available.[/QUOTE]

Just wait until you get 200 projects in there... and one of the more important projects doesn't get done because you trusted the system and yet forgot to have a context assigned. At this point, you'll stop trusting OmniFocus and the entire system will crash causing you to spiral into the state you were before you were interested in GTD. Might not be such a bad thing. Or even worse, you don't trust the system anymore and yet you still place tasks into OmniFocus, sorta, half using it. Your mind quickly becomes numb without you knowing it and you are stuck in the ether.

[QUOTE=GeekLady]I'm a little confused, if you're working from a project view anyway, why do you need to view actions without a context? They must be assigned to a project or they'd still be stuck in your inbox. And if you're working from the project, you can still see them, provided you are filtering to see all actions, since contextless actions aren't considered available.[/QUOTE]

When I decide that a task is not a single task but a project, I create this project in project view, and split it into (hierarchical) tasks. Actually this is "organizing" according to GTD, not "working (doing)", sorry for the wrong word :). But sometimes it's easy to forget to assign context, as a result the next action does not appear in context view (from which I "work"), and as SpiralOcean noticed, it's easy to miss some important task.

I'll send feature request to Omni for no-context view / filter.

I absolutely agree. This workflow bug has bitten me twice.

Okay, I understand what you mean now. I got so caught up trying to understand why you'd create and work on a task without a context that I completely missed that you had forgotten to give them one. I'm sorry.

Would sending context-less tasks to the Inbox be a good solution?

Note: this behavior hit me when my "Office" context accidentally was deleted. All of a sudden, my critical items weren't showing up and I had to go through each project to look for the missing tasks.

Suggested implementation: When there are actions with unassigned context, the Context view should add an [B]-UNASSIGNED-[/B] context to the top of the context list. This would, of course, contain all unassigned actions.

The user can then simply drag tasks into the appropriate context... and when the unassigned count drops to zero, the context also disappears from view.

This behavior, of course, would ideally be governed by a preference option.

[QUOTE=dbyler;19159]Suggested implementation: When there are actions with unassigned context, the Context view should add an [B]-UNASSIGNED-[/B] context to the top of the context list. This would, of course, contain all unassigned actions.
[/QUOTE]

I think that is a great suggestion.

[QUOTE=dhm2006;19160]I think that is a great suggestion.[/QUOTE]

Thirded, that's a great idea as this has caught me out a couple of times already.

Not sure how many "Great idea" posts are necessary (please do count this as #4), but I think we should all use that handy "Send Feedback…" menu to shoot our votes into the system in the "accepted" fashion.