The vast majority of my tasks are phone calls. But what do you do in OF when you've left a message and are waiting for the person to call back? I can't mark the task "completed," because we haven't actually spoken to discuss the matter.
In a thread on "delegated tasks," one post touched on this subject:
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost...0&postcount=32
An interesting approach, but handling "in progress" tasks wasn't really the thrust of that thread, so that was the only relevant post, and that method doesn't quite work for me.
I'm sure GTD purists will weigh in on this, but on the surface, what seems to be missing from OF (and frankly from GTD) is the concept that
often, a task does not have only two statuses: "done" and "not done." There is, as we all know, a 3rd status: "in progress."
Years ago I abandoned "Now Up-To-Date" for iCal. But NUD's to-dos had 3 status options: "not done," "in progress," and "done." So each task's checkbox was either:
(a) clear and empty;
(b) yellow with a hyphen (like some Apple software, indicating that only *some* of a parent folder's contents have been enabled); or
(c) blue with a check mark; respectively.
[Screenshot attached.]
Clicking a checkbox cycled through the 3 options, and the user could specify whether completed items would remain visible for awhile or disappear immediately. If they remained visible, a dotted line appeared, and they were placed beneath it. The system was profound in its simplicity.
I realize a 3-position checkbox may not be "pure GTD," but everyone has to agree, in theory, that not every task is fully served by two positions! What if a task is "cut the front lawn," and you're interrupted before finishing? Or what if you called Susan about the potluck, but you're waiting for her to call you back?
Wouldn't it be nice to have a simple and elegant way of indicating this in OF?
My instinct is to ask Omni for 3-position checkboxes (without the colors or dotted-lines) -- but
only as an *option*, set via preferences, since no doubt some users will only want an "on/off switch." But for those of us who routinely use dimmers, :-) this seems like a reasonable, real-world request. And with a preference allowing users to choose either 2-position or 3-position checkboxes, we'd have a win-win situation for all.
Having said that, I'm open to new ways of doing things.... But what could be simpler? Some of the suggestions in the "delegated tasks" thread were rather convoluted. (No offense to anyone who posted there!) There were complex schemes of nested contexts. There was the creation, after placing a call, of a separate, child event; then updating the child event along the way, or deleting the child event, returning focus to the parent event after a specified period of time, etc.... Oh, what a tangled web....
Why not the
*option* of a checkbox that says -- at a glance -- "this task is in progress"?