[smiggles]

Originally Posted by brianogilvie

Let me put in a plug for the current distinction between action groups and projects, just for the sake of argument. I'm not sure I wholly agree, but I can see value in distinguishing them.

A project is some desired outcome that takes more than one action to complete, but where you can define what a reasonable outcome would be. "Become the world's leading triathlete" is not a project--perhaps it's a life goal--but "Prepare for Iron Man 2008" might be one. You know that it's not something that's actionable in itself, but you have a sense of what getting there means.

An action group is a set of actions that, taken together, contribute to that outcome but aren't sufficient. It's like a lemma in a mathematical proof: it's not independent (at least in the context of the proof), but it hangs together. Within the context of my Iron Man example (I've never run more than a half-marathon nor cycled more than 40 miles, so this is fantasy land), "Train to improve century time" might be an action group. Getting it done is not for its own sake but for the sake of the Iron Man project.

A cyclist might make that an independent project, if his or her goal is do do well in a 100-mile race. So the distinction is semantic; it depends on the user's goals. The question is what it takes to arrive at closure. I see a value in maintaining the distinction. When I was using Life Balance, which did not distinguish different hierarchical levels, I found myself prefixing "(p)" to projects, so I could tell the difference. Other people might not find the distinction useful, and I might be able to live without it, but I wouldn't like to see it disappear.

Thank you brianogilvie. I will try to look at my projects/action groups similarly and see if that makes a difference. in some ways this is semantics. But in OF it's manifest in how they have organized the system. I'll give it a try to think of it this way.

I find this whole organizational debate regarding folders, projects, actions, sub-folders etc. very interesting as I'm still an OF newbie and still trying to strike the right organizational balance.