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Originally Posted by michelle
Our plan all along has been to automatically choose your next action once you complete the current action. We recently had someone disagree with this concept. He feels that manually going through your projects and choosing your next action is part of the GTD process and it should not be automated. We feel this takes time away from actually doing actions. Are there others that have a strong opinion on this?
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Yes, I believe that there is a human element to selecting one next action from a list of possible next actions that cannot be automated, at least not always. The GTD book even talks about scanning your list for a next action that fits your time available, priorities, energy level, mood, interests, etc.
And stepping back just a bit, GTD is more than a productivity-enhancing system. Forcing all feature discussions to be measured on the productivity scale seems to miss something essential about the GTD system. Yes, it helps with productivity. But it’s also about getting little details out of your head into a trusted system so that (a) you remember and can intelligently manage your work to fit your life and (b) you can spend time thinking about higher-level things more often. IMO, discussions about OmniFocus features should treat these goals as being equally important as productivity and time-savings.
Now, having said all that, I think it would be a fine OPTIONAL feature to have automated next-action selection. It should come with a simple switch to bias it toward depth-first or breadth-first selection: that is, to prefer taking as many tasks as possible from a single project or to prefer taking one task from as many different projects as possible. Not only do I think that this should be an optional feature, but I think it should be easy to toggle between using it and not.
To put it a different way, there are times when I know that my tasks are all about equal and I’m fine being fed an automated stream of tasks. And just as often, there are times when I want to use my brain to pick the most appropriate tasks. This, I believe, is consistent with the word and spirit of GTD.
— Tim