[MEP]

Originally Posted by janT

Of course, all this only means that "available" seems to be the more relevant category than "next".

"Available" is the more relevant category. If you subscribe to David Allen's form of GTD, then "Available" actions in OmniFocus are "next actions" in GTD. And OmniFocus's "Next" actions are actually a very limited subset of what GTD's next actions are. I have also mentioned this a couple times on the forums, but no one seems to care. I just got over it personally. I'm not so pedantic that I can't just use "Available" when I want "Next". Personally, I intend to turn off "next action" highlighting when styles are more fully implemented -- it's only distracting and not really informative (and before someone points it out, Yes, I know I once thought the distinction was really important, but I've since identified that as a bad habit. GTD is a process).

Third, I think a project really is just a "conainer" of (related) actions / tasks. So there is no need for three categories of containers: projects, buckets and folders. But this has been discussed before, and I think buckets and folders do not hurt.

I would've agreed a few days ago, but I've just recently warmed up to the notion of folders (just as I've only recently started to warm to the idea of action groups rather than sub-projects). I think that most of us are used to using different GTD software tools. Some of us came here from Kinkless while others came here from iGTD or Actiontastic or one of the other Mac GTD apps out there. For all of their differences, most of these tools all share some common structures and elements, sub-projects being one of them.

But as I reread David Allen's book (which I am doing mostly because of discussions on this forum), I only find one mention of sub-projects and it's pretty open-ended and Allen's comments assume you're doing this on paper really -- at the time he wrote GTD, no tool for automatically tracking actions in both projects and contexts existed. I think the Omni folks may be on to something, though I'm still wrapping my head around exactly what.

I think Omni is redesigning the GTD application in a pretty fundamental way by not allowing sub-projects in favor of action groups and folders. But they're not redefining GTD. In fact, I think this might be an improvement or a refinement of a portion of GTD that was previously left pretty vague. I'm refactoring my list today, in fact, to see if I can use these different structures more effectively.