'Inactive' Folders
 

I currently have a number of folders set to 'inactive'. The projects in those folders are then quite hard to find - they are not available under the on-hold, pending, dropped or completed filters - but only in the 'all projects' view.

In my opinion, this makes it easy to accidently lose track of these projects, especially since I have perspectives for reviewing each of the active, on-hold etc .. and I thought that covered them all :( Now I need to create a new perspective for 'all' and try and mentally filter out the ones that are covered in the other perspectives.

Wow, I had never noticed this was possible before. Alarmingly there is no clue from its icon or title font that a folder is inactive. In addition to the effects cyleigh noted, all subordinate tasks disappear completely from any context view -- very effective hiding, too effective for me.

Folders & contexts are slated to get inactive icons before 1.0, and possibly some sort of styling in the sidebar, but the icon may be sufficient.

Whew! That is good news!

I'm wondering if the "Active" option in the contextual menu for folders and contexts should be paired with an "Inactive" option rather than being a stand-alone boolean toggle.

Ordinarily, I'd think that toggling "Active" on and off with a single option would be sufficient, except that project states behaves differently. Projects are [I]always[/I] set to one of four states: Active, On Hold, Completed, or Dropped. You cannot [I]unset[/I] them (i.e. they always display a check mark for one of the four states).

So perhaps folders and contexts should behave similarly: always set to either "Active" or "Inactive".

A minor point, to be sure, but seems to make more sense to me.

Like [b]cyleigh[/b], I’d like to be able to see ‘Inactive’ folders in the ‘Pending’ and/or ‘On Hold’ Projects lists. Perhaps it would make sense for folders to have the same status settings as projects, viz. ‘Active’, ‘On Hold’, ‘Completed’, and ‘Dropped’. At least for my purposes it would be helpful to make the distinction between ‘Active’ and ‘On Hold’ folders: it should then be obvious in which Project view the ‘On Hold’ folders should appear.

[QUOTE=Toadling;26371]
Ordinarily, I'd think that toggling "Active" on and off with a single option would be sufficient, except that project states behaves differently. Projects are [I]always[/I] set to one of four states: Active, On Hold, Completed, or Dropped. You cannot [I]unset[/I] them (i.e. they always display a check mark for one of the four states).[/QUOTE]

Not quite. Since, if the project is in an inactive folder it doesn't show up in any of the above filter settings - only in all. I personally think that this is a bug, the projects should show up in either on-hold or pending - I don't care which.

Lost folders
 

I too lost some folders for a while until I realized that they were set with the Active folder unchecked. Bothersome certainly.

A separate Inactive filter would be great. I do not want them showing up in On-Hold or in Pending. I use an Inactive folder to hide my template projects. I don't want those exposed when I'm viewing On-Hold or Pending projects.

I'm a bit confused, I think. Why not mark the projects as On-Hold or as Pending if that's where you want them to appear? Is there some use case I'm not thinking of?

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;26528]I'm a bit confused, I think. Why not mark the projects as On-Hold or as Pending if that's where you want them to appear? Is there some use case I'm not thinking of?[/QUOTE]

Of course, it depends entirely how you’ve got your system set up. Like many people, I use folders and sub-folders for broad (and more specific) definitions of areas of responsibility. There have been times when I just don’t want to think everyday about certain areas of responsibility—either because I can’t, or because I don’t want to think about those things for a while (and know I haven’t got to).

So, for example, I am living in Geneva for a year as part of my university course in the UK. When I got here, there was no Internet connection in my flat—therefore, I didn’t want to be reminded daily about any Website design stuff (plus, I needed to concentrate on moving in and settling here). I could of course just have disabled all the relevant contexts, but that would have been inappropriate since I wanted to keep some of my online-related contexts for the times when I went to use the Internet in a local cybercafé. So, I marked as Inactive the Web-design folder in my system. However, I thought at the time that it would have been useful to have seen what was in that and other disabled folders when I was doing my reviews.

I’ve been meaning to write to Omni support about this ever since I noticed it a couple of months ago—this thread has spurred me on to follow that up at last! (Heh, just because I’m vaguely organized doesn’t necessarily mean I Get Things Done.)