[curt.clifton]

Originally Posted by curt.clifton

They most certainly are not! Uncompleted action groups may or may not have additional, as yet unplanned, steps remaining.

Originally Posted by ptone

I think this stretched logic leads to some flexibility at the cost of intuitive use for most.

If a action group has unplanned actions, then it can be considered "Completed as planned"

If you want to go back and reactivate it, then set to view completed, add an action, and if action groups were set to autocomplete, they could become uncomplete again as soon as a new action is added.

How is my logic stretched? OmniFocus is about getting things DONE, not getting things PLANNED. The system is predicated on the assumption that you have identified your single next action to move a project forward, not every action necessary to complete it. (See Allen's book for more on why that is a good idea.) I think the current behavior is an unholy compromise, but making action groups auto-complete would cause people to lose track of work that needs to be done. You can't actually be suggesting that people should remember every single action group that they have not fully planned so that they can go through the tap dance you describe when they remember that they need to add another action to the group. That would be absolutely ludicrous, so surely you don't mean that.

I argued strenuously last summer that the parent action of the group should show up in Context mode when all the children are completed. I still think that's the right behavior. It's unmuddled, doesn't allow items to fall through the cracks, and does not have the logical problem of the current system where a childless action group is treated differently than a single action.

Having a checkbox in the inspector to make an action group auto-complete-able would be great. I would use that for action groups that I know are fully planned (like many of my repeating action groups). But making action-groups auto-complete by default is a recipe for disaster.

Background reading on the current design can be found in these threads from last summer: Single tasks as project groups & context vs project group, Auto Completing Projects (this thread led to the Stalled Projects view in Planning mode), and Feature request: Checkbox for project - projects -> tasks (starting with Brian's post #15).