[recenelloa]

Yes, that does make sense. Thank you. Now what about my former issue:

I feel this is a very important thing to focus on and there should be an archive section rather than just simply hiding the completed projects out of the Active view.

What's going on with that?

[Tim Wood]

We have some ideas for reporting for the future, but nothing specific for a 'Archive' section. I'm not sure what you envision a section would look like, so more details would be useful.

For example, if we had a project to do at home ("Repair retaining wall after neighbor's car is towed out of yard" -- not hypothetical, sadly), then I'd file that in my "Home" folder, possibly in a subfolder of "Yard" or whatever.

Now, once that project is completed (it is, happily) I might want to go back and look at the attached PDF files the insurance adjustor sent. Where would I look for it? Well, it related to Home/Yard so that's where it should be. Completing the project doesn't remove it from its area of responsibility. If we moved it to an Archive section, we'd need to mirror exactly the folder tree that is in the sidebar; economy would dictate we should just leave it where it is.

Now, that said, we would like to have some sort of "Archive and prune" (terminology TBD) functionality that you might choose to run periodically (possibly per year/quarter or whatever you like) that mirrors completed projects off into a separate archive file (or possibly a section within the document, but possibly canned and more or less immutable). This seems like more of a runtime optimization than anything else (shrinks the file size, lowers the amount of data we need to load & search and so on).

If you have specific thoughts about what an Archive section would look like and how it would help you, we'd love to hear about it!

[FixedOn66]

As Tim said, projects are not always totally planned out from the beginning. In David Allen's Getting Things Done method, which was the inspiration for OmniFocus (even if it's more flexible than GTD), a project is any outcome that requires more than one physical action to complete.

But I would argue that repeating projects are almost always totally planned out. So why can't repeating projects be set to automatically be marked complete after the last action is complete?

I have weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly projects that I want repeated. The weekly one is the most frustrating. After I check off the two actions, I would think OmniFocus could be smart enough to know the project is done and reschedule the next one for next week. But no. I have to fumble around in project view (no remaining actions to do a quick jump to the right spot) and mark the project complete. Too much work!

The repeating/completed projects needs to be rethought. It took me about a month just to figure out why the project wasn't repeating. Good thing I'm running a parallel planner. OmniFocus isn't quite ready for my Trusted System yet. :-)

[joelande]

Originally Posted by Tim Wood

We have some ideas for reporting for the future, but nothing specific for a 'Archive' section. I'm not sure what you envision a section would look like, so more details would be useful.

Viewing completed actions serves two useful purposes. 1) It gives one a feeling of acomplishment, 2) and it serves as a kind of personal log.

I think there are two distinct and yet related needs here. 1) Historical reporting and 2) Archiving to make the database more efficient.

Some free-associated thoughts:
- I set up a "Completed Items" perspective as a way to review what I had done. Major problem I ran into here was that there was no way (that I could see) to view the relevant completion date information. Completion date is recorded in the inspector, but there apparently isn't any way to view it in a column.

- It would be nice to have a "historical" (journal?) mode that allowed you to view your completed actions with a journal-like (timeline-based) GUI.

- It shoudl be easy to answer questions like:
-----"Show me what I did today"
-----"Show me what I did last week"
-----"Show me what I did last month"
-----"Show me what I did on September 21, 2005"

- It should be able to filter based on folder/project, so that when printing a report for the boss, it did not include personal items.

- It should include reports that would look nice enough to hand in to the boss.

Regarding archiving for file efficiency, it is hard to say where this limit lies, but I am sure at some point it will be needed.

Couple thoughts regarding Archiving data:
- You should be abel to select which items you want to keep and which items you want to archive

- There should be some sort of indicator showing you how much space (and perhaps how much efficiency? will be gained) by archiving the current selection (updated in realtime as selections are changed)

- The archives should be able to be opened in a read-only state

- There should be an option to search across all of the archives

Originally Posted by Tim Wood

If we moved it to an Archive section, we'd need to mirror exactly the folder tree that is in the sidebar; economy would dictate we should just leave it where it is.

Would this still be the case if it where only possible to archive a project in it's entirety?
Would there be cases when you wanted to only archive part of a project (this requiring the mirror data structure)?

[iNik]

On projects in general: When I'm doing my review, I often can't think of how to work through a project at all. So, I zero down to a next action. Yes, just one, because then I don't have to stress out about how to get from A-Z, I can just do A and get back to it later to find B. If projects auto-completed, this would kill me. I (almost) never completely sketch out projects in OF. Too hard. If I need a detailed project plan and work breakdown, that's something for MS Project (and I'm sorry we don't use OmniPlan at work -- grr) or a gigantic Word document.

Regarding archiving: Having a simple list (searchable?) like a journal of everything I've done would be fantastic. The ability to turn things back into tasks/projects would be neat, but not necessary, in my mind. In Entourage, I used to just turn projects into notes with a timestamp and the date the project was completed. (I didn't even record individual tasks -- although I did at first) It was a great thing to have when it came time for annual reviews, etc.

[iNik]

A filter option for projects to display ONLY projects with actions and another for showing projects without actions (nice for review) would be quite handy.

[FixedOn66]

Originally Posted by iNik

If projects auto-completed, this would kill me.

How about having an OPTION to auto-complete a project? Default to NO and let those of us who expect a repeating project to actually repeat have that option.

Your example of drilling down one or two actions is a good idea though. I'll have to try that sometime.

[coconino]

Originally Posted by FixedOn66

How about having an OPTION to auto-complete a project?

I logged on to make exactly that point. The more I work with OF the more I want some (and only some) projects to be marked as complete when all the actions are completed. This is mostly the case for repeating tasks such as daily or weekly routines. In other cases I'm happy with the current functionality.