Part of my cycle: 'Reschedule Incomplete Tasks…' to now. 'Automatically Level Resources' enabled. A day of work occurs. At the end of the day, knowing when any tasks (that were acted on) actually started, how long they took, and their completion status, I proceed to update things. When I try to adjust their start time, I often find that OP moves them forward (due to their existing priorities and order), but that if I first mark them as complete, then I can move them back to when they actually started. This might be occurring more often if I've rescheduled tasks before trying to set their actual start time (and marked as completed), so I'll try to not do that.
How do others deal with updating tasks after the fact? Would it be useful to have some sort of mechanism, such as if you try to move a task back (after you've already rescheduled with automatic leveling on), and OP says it doesn't belong there, to present, in a dialog: "Do you want to back-date this task and have its priority and/or order in the project automatically adjusted?"? Perhaps this would be too haphazard of a process to implement. Certainly any tasks with incomplete prerequisites would probably not fit into this type of process. Omni suggested that if I had a series of tasks set with dependencies, that if I marked the first as complete and moved it back in time, that the others would fall back in time, which sounds like a good thing for me to try.
How do others deal with updating tasks after the fact? Would it be useful to have some sort of mechanism, such as if you try to move a task back (after you've already rescheduled with automatic leveling on), and OP says it doesn't belong there, to present, in a dialog: "Do you want to back-date this task and have its priority and/or order in the project automatically adjusted?"? Perhaps this would be too haphazard of a process to implement. Certainly any tasks with incomplete prerequisites would probably not fit into this type of process. Omni suggested that if I had a series of tasks set with dependencies, that if I marked the first as complete and moved it back in time, that the others would fall back in time, which sounds like a good thing for me to try.