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Originally Posted by paulduv
Yes, but it's still breaking the system by design, is it not?
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No, it's not.
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Well, this system is actually a prioritizing system, like priority 1,2,3... but much, much worse. When you're consulting OF for what's available, it turns out you've been forced to rank your actions in all of two possible ways:
• something you can do next
• oblivion
You're saying that the Show Next Actions view is meant to show only a small list of possible actions to take... What could possibly be the justification for that?! The length of that list should be totally up to me. When I have 20 next actions, of course I want to see 20 next actions.
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By definition, a parallel project (or action group) can be done in any order. OmniFocus arbitrarily takes the first one in the list to designate as the Next Action if you use a view (Next Actions) that is designed to only show you one. This allows you to order them in a priority ranking
if it matters to you without doing any harm if you choose not to do that. If you were doing GTD on paper, you would have to make a list, and something would have to be at the top left corner of that list, no? But if you understood that the first 3 things on the list didn't have any sequential dependency, you could look at that list and pick the second or third item to do first if that better met your current context, energy, focus, etc. The Available selector (instead of Next Actions) allows you that same flexibility.
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And, by the way, I would expect to have at least that number at any one time, in my life, and I'd like to trust the list. If that list is too much for me, then OF shouldn't just not let me see more, I should absolutely see them all, and drill down and fix things, if I choose. Hiding them doesn't mean their not there. So it's actually just making it harder for me to deal with many available tasks, not easier by any means.
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Use the Available view instead of Next Actions, or change your parallel projects to single action lists, which
do show all available items styled as Next Actions. If you sort the context mode view by Project, the first thing in each block of actions for a given project should be that which would be displayed in a Next Actions only view.
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Again: is it me?! This seems to be about as clearly broken a behaviour as one could hope to find (or not find). There are a lot of threads, it seems, where people say, "let me explain to you why you don't really want that". Those opposing views very often have some merit, and they're often to do with keeping OF as simple as possible. However, this is in a different class. I can't see how it's logically defensible this is a key, fundamentally inconsistent, utterly broken way of handling (let's not forget) parallel projects.
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It may not work in theory, but it works just fine in practice...