Quote:
Originally Posted by omnibob
@Greg Jones: AFAICT, you are exactly correct, that all I'm asking for is a preference option to have SALs show the top Action only when filtering by Next Action. Why not create regular Projects? Because SALs are independent Actions that don't lead to an outcome. You are correct that doing so would be a workaround, but I very much like the separation of SALs from Projects, conceptually. It is an important distinction.
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Conceptually, there is a difference between SALs and Projects-no disagreement there. But in practice with the technology, I still don't see why it should matter. Perhaps the Omni folks will weigh in on this, but as a user the only reason I can tell for the inclusion of SALs in OmniFocus is to show every action in a Next Action list, because the actions in a SAL are totally unrelated to one another. As I said in my first post, I may be overlooking something but aside from showing all SAL actions in a Next Action list (along with the default blue text/folder icon), a SAL functions in every way just like a parallel project.
Since you mentioned the topic of conceptual, I hope you will not mind if I make the observation that only displaying the top item of a SAL in a Next Actions view does force a relationship among tasks that should be unrelated. I would be in effect is saying that I want to do task A before task B on my SAL with no regard to the contexts of the tasks. If I have, during my daily review, determined that task A is the most important (top) item on my SAL and takes 1 hour to complete, then until completed I would not be presented with task B that takes 10 minutes, which I could do if I had 15 minutes available before my next appointment. I would not be able to make a value judgement during the day as to which actions would bring the most value, given my available context, if all my available tasks were not in front of me.