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-   -   Perspectives for repeating projects (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=16488)

hypotyposis 2010-06-14 09:44 PM

Perspectives for repeating projects
 
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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 [I]new[/I] 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 2010-06-14 10:54 PM

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 2010-06-15 08:28 AM

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 2010-06-16 06:10 PM

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 2010-06-16 07:24 PM

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 2010-06-16 08:40 PM

[QUOTE=Ken Case;78784]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.[/QUOTE]

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 2010-06-19 06:43 AM

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;78630]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.[/QUOTE]

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 2010-06-19 11:08 AM

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 2010-06-19 12:05 PM

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;78908]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.[/QUOTE]

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 [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=51112&postcount=2"]morning review[/URL]? 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 2010-06-20 07:57 AM

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!


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