[dondo]

I'm fairly new to OF. I don't understand the relationship between start dates and the "Show actions with status : Next action" selection in the view bar. If I have an item whose due date is today or in the past, and it's the next action in a project, I expected it to show up when I ask for "next actions." But if I have a due date set, actions disappear from the "next actions" view.

The workflow I'm trying to accomplish is this:
- During my daily/weekly/monthly reviews, I sort actions within parallel projects by rough priority.
- I have a "what next" view which filters actions by "next action" and groups by context. This does a great job of suggesting things to do next (and helps me avoid procrastination by hiding the tempting, less odious, roughly equal priority items until I've done the not-so-fun ones).
- I have an action, say "Call accountant" at the top of the "household" project in the "phone" context.
- I call the accountant. She's not in, so I'll want to call her again in a couple days if she hasn't called me back. (She hasn't, sigh.)
- I set the "start date" to two days hence. It disappears, and the next most important thing from that project shows up somewhere.
- Two days later, I want that "call accountant" to pop up. Instead, it never appears again -- I have to go to some other perspective (I use the "ticklers" perspective described by OF wizard curt.clifton) to track time related issues.

I'm not sure if this is a bug, a feature, or my confusion, so I'd love feedback on how or if other people have a solution that would work that doesn't require I change my basic workflow. For now I do a daily scan of the ticklers and remove the start date (ick!), but I'd sure like to be confident that when it's time to follow up on a "waiting for" item, that item would be considered something to do "next".

I know there has been a lot of demand for smart folders; this would clearly solve my problem, and I'm happy to hear that the next generation of the application will include them. But if we're talking about big modifications to OF, I'd prefer a formalization of a "defer until" separate from the "start date", and the inclusion of things deferred things which are now due in the "next actions" list. In the short term, I'd like an item in the "show actions with status" drop down which lets "next actions" include things with start dates in the past. I can't think of any vocabulary for this, since I don't understand how it is useful to have "next actions" not include things with "start dates" in the past.

For the record, I know that David Allen recommends a "waiting for" context for this, and OF has implemented an excellent implicit take on that concept. However, GTD describes a context as a combination of "physical location, tools, materials, and people" -- that is, a boundary around what you can do at a particular moment in time. GTD pretends that "waiting for" is a context, but in my mind it's obviously not; rather, it's a clever way of getting deferred activities out of your way without forgetting about them entirely. Which is to say, as I noted in another thread, "waiting for" a state. OF is much more sophisticated than paper and/or email, and allows solutions that paper and email does not. So please don't tell me about "waiting for" contexts; I've tried that and it doesn't really work for me.

Ok -- and expecting that nobody will have read this far -- does anyone have a suggestion how I can get next actions to show items with a due date (that's not in the future)?