[AmberV]

Once a week I like to review all of my NAs, but I only consider NAs to be items tied to a standard linear project (parallel or sequential), not simply available actions from all Action Group type projects. Is there any way to filter these out? It's pretty easy to visually jump from one to the next in a long list, since the colour is different, but they really bulk up the perspective as I have quite a lot of action groups.

[whpalmer4]

What's an Action Group type project? Do you mean a Single Action List (sidebar icon is a little shoe box)?

You can select only the projects that fit your needs by going through the sidebar and cmd-clicking to add or remove projects, then save as a perspective for future use.

[AmberV]

Right, the "shoe box". Cmd-clicking (i.e. focussing) is completely unacceptable! :) It shouldn't take ten minutes of hunting and pecking just to get a strict Next Action list. Maybe if I had five projects this would be feasible, but then this really wouldn't be an issue. The matter is having several hundred actions in the NA list, and only around thirty of them being actual "next actions" in the strict definition of the word. The rest are just spam from the blue box groups since they *all* get printed in this filter setting.

[Lucas]

Right, I think you want to do the step of "saving as a perspective". Check out "Using perspectives to store your OmniFocus window settings" in the Omnifocus help.

[whpalmer4]

Another approach would be to make the Single Action Lists be parallel projects, which work pretty much the same but will only show the first available item as a Next Action instead of all available items. Give the perspective option a try, though, as it is very powerful and useful in many different situations. Many of us rarely view our data without one!

[AmberV]

Thanks, but I already know quite a lot about perspectives and so forth (I've been using this application since the alpha days), this doesn't really address what I'm trying to accomplish though. I already have a perspective for reviewing next actions, the problem is that the available "Next Action" filter does not distinguish between actions which are next in a project, and single-actions which are attached to dumping bins. Since I use both of these types rather heavily, there is a lot of "false positives" in my NA review.

Regarding last comment: There is are some important technical and philosophical differences between parallel projects and single action buckets which I'd rather not sacrifice just for one perspective and one weekly review. That might muddy things up even further than they are. At least now I can visually skip over the "blue lines" in the NA review. If everything was Parallel or Sequential, it would take quite a lot more work to skip over the unnecessary items.