[matt2]

@davisre: ok - it seems from lizard's response and your issue that I need to think of an action group as a *complete* list of all the actions to be done to finish it, rather than as one action in a hierarchy with a few identified child sub-actions : the mind set I arrived at via the action-to-actiongroup promotion that happens when I used the action-indent approach.

[petecj@gmail.com]

Originally Posted by Young Daniel

Would it be possible to have an option to have an action group/project auto complete when there are no children left?

This seems natural to me as a compromise. Intuitively, I give a project an overall name and once all the tasks are done to complete it, then I want that closed out. Right now, I have to check it complete, then change the completion date manually (if I am going back to clean up completed events after the fact).

[Brian]

Groups contain actions: groups are not themselves actions. That's why they don't auto-complete, and why they don't have contexts.

In this respect, a group is behaving like a project, which we also don't auto-complete. When you check off all the actions in a project or a group, there is an implied last step - to double-check that you didn't forget anything, at your next review.

With auto-completion, that step would be too easy to neglect, and opportunities to be proactive would fall through the cracks.

It's tempting to take the out of making behaviors like this a preference, but if you apply that too often, you force everyone to wade through the 100 preferences they don't care about to find the one that they do.

[davisre]

Originally Posted by Brian

Groups contain actions: groups are not themselves actions. That's why they don't auto-complete, and why they don't have contexts.

In this respect, a group is behaving like a project, which we also don't auto-complete. When you check off all the actions in a project or a group, there is an implied last step - to double-check that you didn't forget anything, at your next review.

With auto-completion, that step would be too easy to neglect, and opportunities to be proactive would fall through the cracks.

Heh. Yeah, another way it would be easy to neglect action groups whose actions are completed would be if OmniFocus turned the action following the group into the next action. Which it does. A rigid consistency between the behavior of projects and action groups makes very little sense in a realistic workflow.

Uncompleted action groups are noise.

[curt.clifton]

Originally Posted by davisre

Uncompleted action groups are noise.

They most certainly are not! Uncompleted action groups may or may not have additional, as yet unplanned, steps remaining.

[Schimmi]

Hi!

Here is another vote for another handling of uncompleted groups.

I am often in the situation that I complete an action and then realise that I might have forgotten to fill up the action group with remaining actions. Then there are basically three options:

• wait for the next review (Which might take a week or so. Then I basically forget the project for this week.)
• go into project view and search for the action group. This is complicated because I cannot use the Switch feature anymore to get it automatically focused.
• undo the completion and use the Switch feature. This contradicts the meaning of completion, as the action is completed in fact. And I only unclick it because I need it as reference for the action group to focus it in the project view.

My proposal would be to add a implicit "Group Foo completed" action for a group, or make a group without available action into an action itself. This has been proposed before and I think it's what many people will want and expect.

I think the review of projects is very important in GTD, but making it the only way to solve this group problem can slow down your progress a lot (several days until the next review) or it makes you extra work to check the group manually (if you remember that it was not complete yet).

The argument that the preference pane should not be filled up is a good one normally. But it is already so full and I don't see why this kind of option would not be important enough to be put it there. It breaks the workflow considerable and makes OF unconfortable in those cases. That should be reason enough.

Moreover notice that there is already a "Projects & Action Groups" section there. A whole section for only one option. The group option would at least justify the use of this separate section in this dialog ;-)

Schimmi

[ptone]

Originally Posted by curt.clifton

They most certainly are not! Uncompleted action groups may or may not have additional, as yet unplanned, steps remaining.

I think this stretched logic leads to some flexibility at the cost of intuitive use for most.

If a action group has unplanned actions, then it can be considered "Completed as planned"

If you want to go back and reactivate it, then set to view completed, add an action, and if action groups were set to autocomplete, they could become uncomplete again as soon as a new action is added.

-P

[curt.clifton]

Originally Posted by curt.clifton

They most certainly are not! Uncompleted action groups may or may not have additional, as yet unplanned, steps remaining.

Originally Posted by ptone

I think this stretched logic leads to some flexibility at the cost of intuitive use for most.

If a action group has unplanned actions, then it can be considered "Completed as planned"

If you want to go back and reactivate it, then set to view completed, add an action, and if action groups were set to autocomplete, they could become uncomplete again as soon as a new action is added.

How is my logic stretched? OmniFocus is about getting things DONE, not getting things PLANNED. The system is predicated on the assumption that you have identified your single next action to move a project forward, not every action necessary to complete it. (See Allen's book for more on why that is a good idea.) I think the current behavior is an unholy compromise, but making action groups auto-complete would cause people to lose track of work that needs to be done. You can't actually be suggesting that people should remember every single action group that they have not fully planned so that they can go through the tap dance you describe when they remember that they need to add another action to the group. That would be absolutely ludicrous, so surely you don't mean that.

I argued strenuously last summer that the parent action of the group should show up in Context mode when all the children are completed. I still think that's the right behavior. It's unmuddled, doesn't allow items to fall through the cracks, and does not have the logical problem of the current system where a childless action group is treated differently than a single action.

Having a checkbox in the inspector to make an action group auto-complete-able would be great. I would use that for action groups that I know are fully planned (like many of my repeating action groups). But making action-groups auto-complete by default is a recipe for disaster.

Background reading on the current design can be found in these threads from last summer: Single tasks as project groups & context vs project group, Auto Completing Projects (this thread led to the Stalled Projects view in Planning mode), and Feature request: Checkbox for project - projects -> tasks (starting with Brian's post #15).

[ptone]

Originally Posted by curt.clifton

I argued strenuously last summer that the parent action of the group should show up in Context mode when all the children are completed. I still think that's the right behavior. It's unmuddled, doesn't allow items to fall through the cracks, and does not have the logical problem of the current system where a childless action group is treated differently than a single action.

I think this is a reasonable option, though I'm not sure if the action group parent should just appear in the no-context container if one was not assigned to it.

Having a checkbox in the inspector to make an action group auto-complete-able would be great. I would use that for action groups that I know are fully planned (like many of my repeating action groups). But making action-groups auto-complete by default is a recipe for disaster.

I think a preference combined with the inspector option you describe would be the best scenario.

I'm only suggesting that if there is no preference, a default to auto-complete would lose the feature of strict GTD partial planning, while making it more intuitive to non-GTD OmniOutliner users, and those who are using repeating actiongroups from context view.

Thats a subjective call for Omni to make - its clear where they stand currently.

-P