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Nested folders with parallel, sequence, and repeat Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
OK - hopefully one of you out there can help me out with the following scenario (bit long - sorry).

I'm trying to use OF to help with my diet. For each meal I eat a set of things (carbs, dairy, fruit, veg, etc.). What I want to be able to do is only see the things for the next meal and then, as I cross them all off, I see the things for the next meal, etc. I have repeat set to 24 hours, so tomorrow's meals are automatically populated.

Attempt 1:
I set up a single project called Meals. Within that project, I created a bunch of sub-projects. All of these were sequential, so morning snack comes after breakfast, etc. Inside of each sub-project I put the things to eat as tasks all in parallel. I created a perspective that shows the Eating context (all were in this context), available items, sorted by Due date. This worked as expected - I only saw stuff for breakfast. Now, here's where the problem occurs. When I cross off the items for breakfast, the items for the next day get created (correctly). Since the breakfast sub-project isn't empty, morning snack never shows.

Attempt 1 is how I would like to be able to make this work since it's cleaner and would give me what I want to see in the perspective (just the next meal).

Attempt 2:
Since the previous didn't work, I created a separate project for each meal within a folder. I.e. Meals folder now has a project for breakfast, snack, lunch, etc. In each project are the things to eat. All are in the Eating context. My perspective now is grouped by project for the Meals folder (focused), grouped by project, and sorted by due. I could live with this, except when you group by project, that seems to override the sort by due, i.e. the sort-by only works within the group, so if I'm done with breakfast, it still shows up at the top of the list, even though all other tasks are due later than morning snack. IMO, the sort-by should work by figuring out the tasks and then using project as the secondary sort key. This gets a bit tricky, so I'm not surprised that project is the primary to use for grouping and sort is within the group.

I would happily entertain any solutions to either approach or even additional approaches. They key is that I want to be able to have a perspective that only shows the next meal.

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
I think you're headed in the right direction.
Make the project parallel also, and set a start time on each of your meals. (Set it for just after you normally complete your previous meal, if you want to be able to plan ahead.) Set the repeat pattern to "assigned" instead of "completed" so that it'll reappear at the same time every day. Now when you're setting up the perspective, only the current meal will be "available".

The other approach would be to have the whole project repeat instead of the individual meals. That would keep all the meals for one day together in a completed project, rather than piling up a bunch of completed breakfasts, snacks, lunches, and dinners all in one project. (Again, repeat from assigned dates and assign start times to each meal.)

Does that help?
 
To be honest I didn't entirely follow what you are doing - I'd have to reread a couple times. But if sorting by date is a limitation, what about naming meals with an alpha sort set of names like:

01Breakfast
02Lunch
03Dinner

Would that help?

-P
 
Thanks for the help. Setting the start times seems to be doing the trick - I'll have to test it out some more today. I didn't try setting repeat on the project, I'll have to try that later (new inbox item). I hide completed tasks, so it's not a biggie.
 
 


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