Repeating Action behaviour
 

Yes this might have been hinted at before but if anyone can point me to any discussion on this I would be grateful or just tell me what I am doing wrong.

SCENARIO:
You have a Sequential Project with 3 actions each set to repeat monthly.
Action one is on the 1st
Action two is on the 7th
Action three is on the 20th

You complete action one on the 1st.
A new action is automatically created for the 1st of the next month but it is inserted between the original and the Action set for the 7th.

On clean up it is still in its original place.
Because of that it becomes the NEXT ACTION rather than Action two going to the head of the queue. (When you create a new action by the "New Action Button" It does indeed go to the bottom of the list.)

Yes you can move actions up and down by u and d but surely this putting a new action in the correct place AUTOMATICALLY should be a priority.

Sorting in context view DOES place actions in there correct place "Due Tomorrow" "Due within that next week" etc but that sorting will not put Action 2 in the correct time slot in context view because it is not considered to be the next action!


I have been using iGTD for sometime and this was an issue there which was fixed. The new iGTD2 is for Lepoard only and is of no use to me as I have a lot of Apps that would need upgrading before I could go to system 10.5.

Sorry if this is a repeat of an already existing thread but I couldn't find an explanation like the one I have given above in my searches by using the term "sequential" or "repeating".

I think several people are simultaneously discovering/realizing this same "unexpected behavior" and are puzzled on how to "fix" it in OF.

OF seems to be really hung up on the location of an Action. So much that the local of an Action trumps the Due Date of any other Action in the Project.

OF has gone back and forth on where the new actions should appear when a repeating action is completed. Some want it at the end of the list, others at the beginning. It seems that some way to control this is needed. Perhaps projects and action groups could have a "Sort Children By" property. This property would be unsorted by default, but could be set to sort by due date, or whatever, and would then automatically keep the kids in line, as it were.

In the interim, would it work for you to make the project parallel and put start dates on the items so that only one action is available at a time?

[QUOTE=Sandpiper;30072]You have a Sequential Project with 3 actions each set to repeat monthly.
Action one is on the 1st
Action two is on the 7th
Action three is on the 20th[/QUOTE]

If you don't have to finish action one before working on actions two or three (i.e. it just happens to be due first), you can simply change your project from Sequential to Parallel.

If you really do have a series that has to be done in a particular order, you can make the entire series repeat rather than its individual actions.

(And yes, we do want to add more control over where repeating actions get placed relative to their peers, it just didn't make the cut for 1.0. Fortunately, 1.0 isn't our last release; it's simply our first non-beta release!)