Quote:
Originally Posted by NickM
As an aside, what is the purpose of these? Are these projects that can't be completed because they're never done (i.e. there will always be single-actions that need to live somewhere)?
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In Canonical GTD™ you track outcomes in the form of actions. Take out the trash; call John about the widget; file bug against OmniFocus re: missing... you get the idea.
If you need more than one action to complete a particular outcome, you roll those up into a project. A project is nothing more than a set of related actions that together will lead to the completion of that outcome.
In OmniFocus, the assumption is most of what you track are these projects, and so the project is the focal point of OF. But many people still need to track these single-action outcomes.
Instead of treating these single-action outcomes like projects (i.e. listing them on the sidebar at the same level as projects, which may clutter up an already full list), Omni created a separate structure, called single-action items, which allow you to group your single, unrelated actions together.
There are some advantages and downsides to this. The primary advantage is that your sidebar isn't cluttered with dozens of these single actions. The primary downside is you lose all of the project-based management actual projects get (like dropping the action).
The functionality we have was a compromise. There are several threads on the topic if you feel like reading all of what went into the decision. Searches for "singletons" and "single actions" should find most of them.