This is to do with the
Show Next Actions preference for contexts. I haven't started using this view" too much yet, but I'm getting more and more OmnifFocus-based, so I expect that I will be.
It looks to me like I won't be able to, though!
My apologies if got this wrong! (Surely I got this wrong!) I tested this out though, and it looks to me that I'm reading this correctly.
From the iPhone manual – page 21:
Keeping track of the next action in each project
Any active project keeps track of the next action that you have yet to
complete. This is useful for figuring out what you ought to do to keep your
projects moving forward.
When you are interested in next actions, you can hide everything else:
At the top-level screen, tap Settings.
Change the In Contexts, show setting to Next.
Now when you look at contexts, you will only see the next action for
each project.
For sequential projects, where you need to do one thing before another,
the next action is the only thing you can do right now to make progress
on the project. For parallel projects, where you can do the actions in any
order, the next action is just the first action in the list, and acts as more
of a suggestion of what you might want to do next.
The problem, it seems to me, is in that last sentence. Thanks for the "suggestion" and all, but are you not
completely breaking the system?
It would be fair to say, would it not, that that last sentence could be replaced with this?
The reason you bother to distinguish between parallel and sequential projects, is that often, you're able to do anything in a project, and so you need those actions to be available. We've built that capability in, with the expectation that you need it. But, on the iPhone, we've designed this "view" to treat both kinds of projects exactly the same way! When it comes to sequential projects, we're showing you "next actions" as you'd expect, and when it comes to parallel projects, we're showing you what happens to be a the top of your list, as you would not expect. We're calling that a "suggestion". This way of showing Next Actions has the obvious benefit of completely breaking the system.
Why do forums cause people (ok, me) to go up a notch in snarkiness? Sorry about that. I bloody love OmniFocus.