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Is there a way to see when a repeating action was last completed? Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Hi all,

Is there an easy way to see when a repeating action was last completed? If I have an action "A" that I want to do every week or so, I can use the inspector to set it to repeat every 1 week from completion, but the new action "A2" that appears when I check off the first action "A1" as completed shows no indication of when "A" was last done. For certain kinds of tasks it would be very helpful to see when the last time I did the action was. For example, "Review News Items Regarding Topic X" is something that I want to do every week or so. It's actually not very important if I do it exactly a week after it was last completed, but it is important that I pick up the review where I left it off (so if it's 9 days since I last did it I would want to pick up the review with the news that was 9 days old).

I hope this is clear. Let me know if not and I'll clarify.

And many thanks in advance for any suggestions. I've come to OF from Ecco (a great outliner PIM in Windows that was sadly orphaned by its owners) and one of the features that I liked about recurring items in Ecco was the ability to have a column for an item that showed its last "done" date - I suppose that's the functionality I'm looking for here.

Thanks!

Abe Z.
 
Abe - happy to help, and welcome aboard! If you switch to the "All Items" perspective, your completed actions will be visible. You can use the search field to locate and select the action you completed, then look at the "completed" field of the inspector.

If you're going to want to see this information on a regular basis, you may want to save a Perspective (a set of saved window settings) that helps you find the actions in question.

Do the following menu selections produce a view that would help you?

View -> Context Mode
View -> Sidebar Filter -> All Contexts
View -> Grouping -> Completed
View -> Sorting -> Completed
View -> Availability Filter -> Completed
View -> Status Filter -> Any Status

This approach will show all your actions grouped and sorted by when they were checked off. If this view does show what you're looking for, you can save it for further use by selecting
Perspectives -> Save window as -> New Perspective.

Now you can bring that view up from the Perspectives menu at any time.

If that view doesn't do what you want, there may be another combination of settings that does. Let us know what you need done differently and we're happy to help.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian View Post
Abe - happy to help, and welcome aboard! If you switch to the "All Items" perspective, your completed actions will be visible. You can use the search field to locate and select the action you completed, then look at the "completed" field of the inspector.

If you're going to want to see this information on a regular basis, you may want to save a Perspective (a set of saved window settings) that helps you find the actions in question.

Do the following menu selections produce a view that would help you?

View -> Context Mode
View -> Sidebar Filter -> All Contexts
View -> Grouping -> Completed
View -> Sorting -> Completed
View -> Availability Filter -> Completed
View -> Status Filter -> Any Status

This approach will show all your actions grouped and sorted by when they were checked off. If this view does show what you're looking for, you can save it for further use by selecting
Perspectives -> Save window as -> New Perspective.

Now you can bring that view up from the Perspectives menu at any time.

If that view doesn't do what you want, there may be another combination of settings that does. Let us know what you need done differently and we're happy to help.
Brian,
Many thanks for your reply. It took me awhile to try out your suggestion but I just did and it worked as you suggested (though I think that on the last two lines you must have meant "Status Filter" and "Flag Filter" rather than Availability and Status). In any case, thanks for your help.

I do think - something to think about for future versions of OF - that many people would probably like having the possibility of a simple column that shows the last time that a repeating item was completed. But that's just my suggestion for the wish list.

thanks again,
Abraham
 
As a quick shortcut, select the current instance and view the Added date in the inspector. The act of completing the original causes the creation of the repeat, and there's no need to track down the original.

The confusion over the names of some of the view bar settings is due to some restructuring that is happening for 1.8. If you want a sneak peek, see this thread: http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=15345
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
As a quick shortcut, select the current instance and view the Added date in the inspector. The act of completing the original causes the creation of the repeat, and there's no need to track down the original.
Excellent tip Bill-thanks! I occasionally like to see when a repeating action was last completed and I never thought to look at the creation date in the inspector-works well.
 
You do have to be careful if you occasionally fall into the trap of marking a repeating action complete on two different devices before syncing (thus getting a duplicate). If you delete the wrong duplicate, then your answer will be off by the delta between the two completions, although this problem also applies to the proposed extra column and Brian's perspective.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
As a quick shortcut, select the current instance and view the Added date in the inspector. The act of completing the original causes the creation of the repeat, and there's no need to track down the original.
This is a very helpful tip - definitely a quicker and easier way to see when an item was last done. One drawback: it's not editable. So, for example, if I do recurring action X on Monday but don't get around to marking it completed until Tuesday, OF will think that it was done on Tuesday, not Monday, and there doesn't appear to be any way (that I see) to change this. This was something that my former task manager (Ecco, a great, but orphaned, Windows program) handled really easily because the Completed box was itself a field (of type date). Not that I'm putting OF down - I am really liking it on many many levels (and still learning its tricks) - but this is just a function that I made use of a lot in Ecco and have been missing in OF.

thanks for the suggestions,
Abe Z.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
You do have to be careful if you occasionally fall into the trap of marking a repeating action complete on two different devices before syncing (thus getting a duplicate). If you delete the wrong duplicate, then your answer will be off by the delta between the two completions, although this problem also applies to the proposed extra column and Brian's perspective.
Just to clarify, how serious a problem would this be? Will it mess up the entire sync? Or just mean that that particular action has incorrect data? And if this happens, what should I do?

thx,
Abe Z.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by amz1 View Post
Just to clarify, how serious a problem would this be? Will it mess up the entire sync? Or just mean that that particular action has incorrect data? And if this happens, what should I do?

thx,
Abe Z.
Only you can say how serious it is for you, and only when you know how big the error is. If you changed it on one device at 10AM (when you did it), and the other at 1PM (looking at your other device which hadn't been synced, and thinking "oh yeah, I did that, must have forgotten to check it off"), and then when you realize this (because there are two copies of the next one), you delete the original, the time would be off by 3 hours. If you did the same thing except changed it on one device on Monday and the other on Thursday (only relevant if you didn't sync in the interim), then you would be off by 3 days.

If you sync a device before using it and after making any changes, this problem shouldn't come up. If it does, and you get a duplicate repeating action, keep the earliest one (I assume you don't mark things completed before you actually do them).

No harm is done to the sync process. If you have a repeating action "take out the trash" which you mark completed in two different places, then sync, you just end up with two copies of "take out the trash" for next week instead of one.
 
Great, many thanks.
AZ
 
 


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