Sort actions manually?
 

Is there a way to manually drag and drop actions into whatever order I want?

For example, I have a meeting and I need to discuss three agenda items during the meeting. I have one action entered for each:

Information item ABC
Information item 321
Information item 987

Omnifocus has a variety of sorting options -- project, flagged, name, due, start, etc. -- but none do what I want. I want to order these actions to match the order I need to present these items in the meeting, so I need complete manual control in sorting order.

If you are in project/planning mode, you should be able to just drag them into the order you want, if they are all actions in the same project. The little dot at the left end of the row is a handle for dragging.

What about in Context mode? this is where i need to manually sort.

each of the "information items" i described is related to a different project, but all share the same context because the place to make progress on them is in one meeting, which i have set up as a context. so i see all these information items under the same context, and i want to manually sort them to match the meeting's agenda.

OF doesn't support manual sorting in context mode. Sorting in Context mode is controlled by the View Bar settings for grouping and sorting. If there is a tie between two items based on those criteria (or if grouping or sorting is turned off), then the order of the items in Planning mode is used. This lets people use the order of projects and actions in Planning mode as a fine-grained priority mechanism. (This has been debated on the forums. It's hard to see how manual rearranging in Context mode would work with the current scheme.)

One workaround for your purposes might be to abuse the duration column. You could turn on the estimated duration column (View → Columns → Estimate) and sort by duration. Then you could enter ascending numbers for your agenda items (1, 2, 3, …). Of course, this only works if you aren't already using estimated duration on these tasks for its stated purpose.

Nope, no manual sort in context mode, and personally, I find the notion problematic -- what is supposed to happen when the underlying data gets changed?

You can drag the actions into a TextEdit window if you just want a quick ad-hoc list you can rearrange. Another slightly unorthodox tactic would be to temporarily assign due dates/times to those actions in the order you want to present them, then sort by due in context mode. Or make a project for the meeting with actions to present the various items, and add links to the actual items in the notes field which you can do by dragging and dropping the action onto another (the quick entry box works well for building up such things if screen space is limited). I think this last approach makes the most sense from a GTD standpoint as there are going to be other tasks in preparing for the meeting so it looks like a project. When you are in the meeting, clicking the link in the notes field of each action will get you a window with the original containing project so you have all the relevant material to present.

You might also group by project in context mode so you can easily find the projects you're looking for when you reach them on the agenda. Just a suggestion.

I was looking for the same solution as sumnerp and came to this thread. I'm new to OF and love a lot of the features of it, but I find this limitation surprising and problematic. I know one poster said being able to sort manually in context mode would be troubling, but I don't see why. I would think OF would be able to create a list (like the text solution somone posted, but without leaving OF) that would be a copy of the items and wouldn't change the project level structure.

My post is really to say I'm wondering if someone has the "answer" to what I perceive as a huge weakness of OM. I like being about to create projects based on the project topic but then to use context to deal with the items when I'm doing them. In this way, I'm using OF to generate to-do lists. Since the order I do things (e.g., errands) in has nothing to do with the order created in the project I find OF much less useful than I'd have hope or expected. While the "abuse duration" solution proposed works great on the desktop, it doesn't work on the iPhone app, so when I'm actually out doing the errands, they are not in the order I need to do them which requires me to continually scan the list for the next store rather than follow my list in order as I used to do with a paper list.

[COLOR="Blue"]Has anyone come up with a useful way of sorting things within context so they are still in that order when synced to the iPhone app? [/COLOR]

Here's how I have stuff set up:

[IMG]http://forums.omnigroup.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1111&stc=1&d=1255128428[/IMG]

On my Mac, I have a parent "Errands" context with sub-contexts for the various specific stores I visit. If I don't have a context that applies to the task in general, it gets assigned to this one.

Grouped inside the Errands context, I have more specific contexts that correspond to specific places (or categories of places) I create tasks for frequently. The contexts I assign stuff to or visit most frequently are at the top of the group.

With the ordering set up this way, I can launch the iPhone app, tap Contexts from the home screen, then tap "Errands" at the top of the context list. At that point, I can either drill down to the specific context to look at the actions for the next store I'm going to, or scroll to the bottom for all the random one-off stuff.

Re-reading your post, I'm wondering if I missed the point a bit - if that's the case, I'll apologize in advance. Give me more info and I'll be happy to assist. :-)

Especially for shopping-type tasks, when I'm in a given context, I generally don't care about what order the tasks are presented in that context. If the tasks are available, I want to do them all, regardless of what project they're from.

It sounds like your workflow is organized differently, though. If you can provide a bit more detail on why the above wouldn't work for you, we can help or write up a feature request as appropriate.

Looks like you've got a bum link there for your picture, Brian...

I, also, would love to be able to re-order items in context view. I have a perspective set up that shows items due today, tomorrow, this week, etc. I would love to be able to manually re-order items under each heading to create a sequential list for myself.

I actually ended up switching over to Things for a bit to take advantage of their manual reordering, but am back to OF because of it's robustness and other customizability that I missed.

I suppose for now i'll implement the estimated duration "hack" described above, but I'd love it if manual reordering could be thrown into the hat of potential features in new versions of OF, if it's no in there already.

Great work all, keep it up!

I also use the Move to Top applescript, which I would guess you can find in the forums, to sort in context mode. It’s not like [I]completely[/I] arbitrary order though. I’ve been thinking it would be neat to write an applescript that would move things up or down in context mode such that it could also change project order, as necessary. I haven’t gotten around to it yet though & I haven’t checked if anyone else has had the same idea.

manual reordering should take precedence over any other criterion i think.

things is great in this respect.

Just happened upon this thread again whilst searching to see what others do in terms of ordering actions within a context. In the absence of due dates/times etc. it seems natural when working in a given context to wish to order actions according to how you wish to complete them and/or assign a higher 'priority' by placing certain actions at the top of the list within a context.

Looking at the xml file(s) that constitute the OF database I can see that folders, projects and tasks appear to have a 'rank' which presumably relates to their 'order' relative to their 'siblings'. Would it not be relatively easy to add an additional 'context ranking' that pertains to a given item's position within a context? This 'context rank' would permit manual reordering within a context and be completely autonomous from the 'planning mode' rank.

Just a thought. Seems rather obvious and so I fully expect folks to point me to that post I've not seen that explains why such a thing is unfeasible :-)

The inability to sort in context is a HUGE issue for a lot of people regardless of what some people think and I am really surprised that this software does not support this feature years later. Why not just add a priority field for contexts and let users order them there as a temporary workaround?? Why instruct users to use a field that would actually be useful to have in your filtering arsenal, such as the estimated time field?

Perhaps not quite as many people find this to be an issue as you think, or there are more requests for other features. I don't really have any reason not to take Omni at their word when they say they work on the features most often requested. Do you?

Being in software development, this request is not a huge request and with even a few users in this forum mentioning it as an issue, you would think it would be considered and ultimately implemented. The iPhone and iPad apps do not support the estimated time field at all so any workarounds with that field mentioned in this thread are therefore unworkable.

another vote for sorting in context view
 

Just adding my voice in case it makes any difference. This (manual sorting of actions in context mode) is a significant missing feature for my workflow -- it's something i would use extremely regularly (which is how often i notice it doesn't exist and get annoyed with Omnifocus). Please work on it! Thanks.

We do have a feature request open on this, but there are other requests that are more popular right now - as always, if you want to be sure that your feature request gets recorded into the development database, you'll want to email it to our [EMAIL="omnifocus@omnigroup.com"]support ninjas[/EMAIL]. Thanks!

(See [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3734"]here[/URL] for info on why we handle it this way.)

I don't know whether the Mac version works this way, but the iPad version sorts in a context in the same order as the projects are listed. So if you sort (by dragging) yor projects alphabetically, then next actions in a context will also be sorted alphabetically.

I presume dates may affect this, but you can get yor sort manually by manually sorting your projects, all other things being equal.

Another vote or manual sorting in context view - and a workaround
 

Put me down as another vote for manual sorting and context view. I'll be emailing the support ninjas momentarily.

And now for my workaround: Sort by "Changed," and then add a space to the end of a task, or delete a space if it's already there. The affected task will float to the top of the list. Repeat for any other tasks you want at the top of the list.

This is a few more clicks than ideal, because it'll be natural for you to do the most important taks first, then the second-most-important, and so on, and when you're done the most important task will no longer be a the top. But it's not a huge amount of work to make another pass to get everything in the right order.

Count me in as well.

I wrote the post [url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?p=101323#post101323[/url] before reading this thread, which pretty much addresses the same issue.

I know its an old thread, sorry! But I need this, but in its absence I wanted to state what I do, as this post comes top on Google searching for this missing feature.

I sort by Name, and then add 1, 2, 3, before the task. I used to then add 1a, 1b, etc when I did not want to reorder everything. I am now at the point of 1a1, 1a2 etc. Its BAD to have to do it this way! but its the only manual way I can think of.