[whpalmer4]

One of my deeply held beliefs is that you want to avoid putting dates on every single action, if at all possible, and you especially want to avoid changing them over and over.

Now, that said, I can envision a workflow where you only dole out a carefully metered amount of actions and have everything else waiting in the wings. Sort of like having an enormous jar full of paper slips with actions written on them, and each day you pull out a handful and do them. That represents a bunch of fooling around with changing start dates, which I don't personally find to be productive, but you should do what works best for you.

Bring up a context mode view, and group by start date. One of the groups you will have is actions with no start date. You can select that whole bunch (click on the first one's handle, scroll to the bottom, shift-click on the last one's handle), bring up the inspector with cmd-shift-I, and set the start date for all of them to some future date.

Note that an action without its own explicitly set start date is treated as if it has one if the parent (action group or project) has one. If you have a project which has a start date, all of its actions will be filed in one of the start date groups (not the No Start Date one). Due dates and flags also have this same inheritance behavior.

Once all your actions have a start date, if you restrict your view to show only Available actions, you will only see actions whose start date has arrived. Every day or week or whatever you'll need to look over your projects and actions to decide which ones should have their start dates adjusted (or simply removed) to make them available for work.