[matt2]

I find myself constantly wrestling with the following problem and hope someone could advise me or point me to the best workaround thread.

I often use the quick add box to add a few actions I just thought of to project X, with a due date in a couple days. If project X already had a few actions with no due dates, these new actions go on the bottom of the list.

Sometimes a few days later, I look at my "next actions" perspective which is sorted by due date to see my NAs that are due today, but project X doesn't even show up in the list as a priority to work on... because it has those prev actions in it with no due date - so those due actions are missed and forgotten.

It seems like the old previously non-urgent actions at the top of project X's list should implicitly become due today, since there's a later action in the list that's due today, i.e. that first action in project X with no due date should show up in a list of "next actions due today" as there is a later action due today that is dependent on these earlier actions also getting done today.

Any suggestions for showing a "next actions, including those implicitly due soon" perspective?

(My current workaround is trying to remember to constantly scan an "all actions due soon" list, picking out the next actions per project... but this sadly misses the GTD benefit of only seeing a much less overwhelming list of next actions, and doesn't show the implicit next actions.)

[whpalmer4]

What does your review strategy look like? If you only look at next actions and don't populate them all with due dates, you'll miss things. Have you tried making an identical context, except set to Due Soon (or just flipping back and forth between Next Actions and Due Soon)? That will at least give you some warning that you've got a project with actions due today. For me, that daily review (either the night before or first thing in the morning) of what the major goals are is essential to avoiding unpleasant surprises.

Make yourself a perspective that groups actions by due date, sorting by project, remaining actions. You can use this to easily identify the projects that have actions due today, tomorrow, yesterday, etc. Here are a couple of approaches that I've used after deciding the main projects to be tackled for the day:

Identify the projects with actions due today, select them in the sidebar, click the Focus button, then operate as usual with the perspectives/view bar settings to show what needs to be done.

Identify the projects with actions due today, and flag those projects, which makes all of their actions inherit the flagged state. Now you can use a Next Actions view further restricted to flagged items without concern that you are missing some of your "implicit next actions" because you are relying on the flag to keep them in your attention, not the due date.

Identify the projects with actions due today. Go down the list and make a selection of all the actions from the appropriate grouping (due today, due yesterday, whatever). Now click the toolbar Focus button, and switch back to Project mode. Set the Next Action selector in the View Bar and you should see the next actions from all the projects that have actions due in the selected time period, even if an individual action doesn't have a due date. If this list is still so long that you still are missing things because they aren't sorted high enough up, you've got too much to do :-)

In any case, those are a couple of the ways you might tackle this. I can't see any way around doing some sort of regular review of the work to be done unless you want to put a due date on everything. Not doing reviews, or putting due dates on everything wouldn't really be in the GTD spirit, in my opinion, though I would never claim that GTD is the right thing for everyone. I do find having as few due dates as possible (thus eliminating endless twiddling as the "fake" due dates aren't constantly added, adjusted, adjusted again) makes life more pleasant. Your mileage may vary, as they say :-)

[Gardener]

I'm curious as to what the hard-due-date actions are? It may just be my job, but I've found that my hard-due-date work and my "work on it until it's done" work tends to separate fairly comfortably into separate projects, so I separate them. I'm not sure if this is a Non-GTD Bad Thing or not.

As an example, let's say that Widget (my usual fake example) is a large already-existing database application for which I regularly provide support and updates.

I could make Widget one project with many kinds of work, but I don't. Instead, I might have:

- Project "Code Widget FancyFeature", a project to complete coding of a new Widget feature of modest size. It might have a project-level due date, but it's mostly free of due dates.

- Project "Prepare for Widget FancyFeature review", with a hard date or hard-dated actions if a customer review is coming up.

- Action "Submit Widget FancyFeature budget status", a due-dated action on my Miscellaneous single-action list.

- Project "Widget Planning", an On Hold project where I dump someday/maybe items relating to Widget.

I do this separation partly to separate my hard dates from my undated work, to reduce the odds that a hard date will surprise me. As part of my weekly review, I try to make sure that all actions with hard due dates are in a position to pop up.

But I also do it because I think of coding, versus documentation and review, versus paperwork tasks like submitting budget numbers, as genuinely separate work, even if it's all for the same project.

So I'm not sure if I'm cheating or not?

Gardener

[whpalmer4]

I'm not sure who you were asking about the hard due date items. Mine tend to be interactions with the outside world -- library books due tomorrow, cell phone bill due Monday, my kid's school project due next week, etc.

Your division of your work sounds quite reasonable to me, so long as you do the necessary reviews to make sure that all the "branches" are proceeding in relative coordination. If you are lax about the reviews, then That's one of the few positives for the monolithic project approach -- everything is right there in front of you, whether you like it or not!

[stagger]

I have the same problem, and I thank all the follow-up posters for their suggestions about how not to miss tasks. But as far as I'm concerned, you're making things too complex.

If there's a project with sequential actions, and an action further down the list has a due date set, it's only logical that all other actions that precede it must be done beforehand. If they don't, you're not using parallel and sequential projects and groups right. OmniFocus needs implicit due dates.

[whpalmer4]

To me, it seems that if anything is being done wrong, it is deciding where to focus one's efforts by looking only at a Next Actions list. Even if you have the implicit due date behavior similar to how flags work, for example, you still don't get enough information to reliably make a good decision.