[mcoad]

Thanks for the explanation, Brian, which is good and clear. I see the logic. However, given the way the interface is designed at the moment the problem persists. Surely it is just an obvious nonsense to have a list called “Due today“ which may in fact be made up of a long list of tasks none of which are due today, and may be due over several dates perhaps well into the future. There’s no way this isn’t going to be mega-confusing.

I’d suggest there are two things here causing the confusion. One is the list heading in the main window as you mention. Changing this would help a lot, though I guess it’ll be hard to find a clear and succinct way of doing it. The other is reflected in the sidebar in Planning mode, and in what Matt says about preferring to see this called Projects mode. Originally, of course, it was, and was presumably changed precisely in order to emphasize what you say: that this is where you do your overall planning rather than dealing with the nuts-and-bolts of the project once planned. However, the sidebar and toolbar continue to talk about “projects” - inevitably, given that’s what they are dealing with - and the lack of some other way of emphasizing that this is a Planning space tends to encourage the piecemeal (“breaking into chunks”) way of thinking you describe.

In other words, I think this distinction between how you use the two modes is confusing for a lot of users - not the concepts themselves of Planning and Contexts, but the way they are implemented. As you say, Planning/Projects is for overall planning, and produces the problems I’ve described if you try to use it for dealing too closely with the detail (wanting it laid out by exact date, for example). But given that the whole point of Contexts is that tasks from different Projects can be carried out in the same Context, this mode easily becomes semi-divorced in the user’s mind from the idea of the Project as a whole. This leaves many in a quandary over just where they should record their processing of actions and do their rethinking about their Projects as such. Contexts work fine when you’re thinking and organizing yourself in looser, “contextual” terms. But when you’re thinking about the Project you naturally go back to the Planning mode, and there are times when you do indeed want to break it into chunks, see how it pans out over time, list things clearly by different dates, etc, not just see it in an undifferentiated list (except for the date column, of course). Hence the confusion I’ve been griping about.

I hope it’s clear what I’m saying. I don’t know what the answer is*, except to change some headings in Projects and try to persuade people to think of Contexts as where they actually get their stuff done. But it seems to me there is a real conceptual problem to be addressed if the app is to be as transparent as I guess we‘d all like it to be.

*Actually I do know what some will say is the answer: get OmniPlan, if you’re so worried about this kind of detail. I don’t think so, however. Apart from the question of overkill, this same confusion is going to persist as things stand at the moment in OF.