Nested On-hold Context + On Hold Context Filter: expected results?
 

Hello,

To show my problem, consider the following 2 contexts:

[IMG]http://lh6.ggpht.com/_WBpLA8NfiM8/TL_nXfdB9jI/AAAAAAAACCc/S12MeBry6DI/s800/NestedContextOnHold.png[/IMG]

The "Email" context contains the (lengthy) emails I still have to write, while the nested "Need Reply" context contain the mail replies I am still expecting from others.

[URL="http://clickontyler.com/blog/2010/10/how-i-use-omnifocus-to-organize-my-life/"]This article[/URL] got me experimenting again with Perspectives. I tried creating a custom "Waiting" perspective with the following settings:

* Context Filter: On Hold
* Grouping: Context
* Sorting: Project
* Availability Filter: Remaining
* Status Filter: Any Status
* Duration Filter: Any Duration

While in this perspective, I see the mail replies I am still expecting, but the list also shows the mail actions from the "Email" context. Is this expected behaviour?

Ringo

Have you selected the "Need reply" context? Basically when editing your perspective you can Cmd+Click each context you want to show in that view. Otherwise in context mode it'll show everything.

How could I forget that... :-)

Now that the proper contexts are selected and snapshotted as my Perspective, I still have one annoyance regarding the availability of tasks:

In a context in "On Hold", I only would like to see the actions I want to review daily. However, in this Waiting perspective the task list also contains actions with a future start date. These become visible too now...

Any way around that?

Ringo

Change the Availability filter from Remaining to Available.

Greg,

These are tasks that are in contexts in state "On Hold". In such a state, all tasks are considered to be unavailable, so filtering on "Available" results in an empty perspective window.

Ringo

Sort by start date, stop looking where appropriate?

You could probably use RobTrew's Where in OF script to search for those actions which have started...

[QUOTE=ringods;87804]Greg,

These are tasks that are in contexts in state "On Hold"...[/QUOTE]

Whoops, forgot about the on hold part for the context-sorry.

I don't if this helps at all, but I have a 'waiting for' context but I don't put the context on hold. I use start dates on all 'waiting for' tasks that I don't want to see until sometime in the future, and then use a perspective similar to yours. At any give time, the list is populated with all 'waiting for' tasks that I can/want to work on at that date/time.

I know my method is different from the method in the linked article above where the author says there is no need to worry about or see these tasks, but at some point one must do something with them. Start dates are enough to bring them back info focus for me, when I can/want to deal with them.

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;87807]You could probably use RobTrew's Where in OF script to search for those actions which have started...[/QUOTE]

You could certainly save and re-use the following search in [URL="http://bit.ly/OF-Find2"]Where in OF[/URL]:
[INDENT][I]tasks where (allows next action of its context is false) and (start date is missing value or start date < now)[/I][/INDENT]
but at the moment Where in OF only displays its results in Project View, which I think you would find messy for this application. (Though the script does show a clean list of matches before offering to select targets in OF itself).

(I disabled the option to display in Context view because there are some marginal cases of task types which can not be seen in Context view. Perhaps I should re-consider this, and get the script to throw up a warning if it hits such cases).

[COLOR="White"]--[/COLOR]

[QUOTE=RobTrew;87809]
but at the moment Where in OF only displays its results in Project View, which I think you would find messy for this application. (Though the script does show a clean list of matches before offering to select targets in OF itself).[/QUOTE]

For this particular application, seeing the extent of the actions being blocked by the on hold items might be beneficial!