[Katpaust]

Hi,

I am new to Mac and new to OF, but not new to GTD and the GTD Addin for Outook, which I have been using for some years.

Since migrating to Mac and OF I find there are several things I miss, one of which is the possibility of creating a new next action, when an item is completed. Is this possible? Have I missed out on something?

Thanks for any help!

Kat

[whpalmer4]

Could you give a bit more detail about this? Are you looking for actions that repeat, or something else?

[Vramin]

I'm not sure I know exactly what Kat is talking about, not having used the Outlook plugin, but I know I occasionally hit something similar.

I have Omnifocus set to mark the project complete as soon as the last action is done, but sometimes I haven't thought of a second action yet, or think of another one on the spot, so I have to be careful to add the new action first (or at least a placeholder) or leave the existing action incomplete until I can identify the next one.

If you're doing the GTD thing of only coming up with the very next action for any given project, it's easy to mark that one done and "complete" the project before you really meant to.

I'm not sure what you'd do about it in software. I love being able to mark all the actions as done and watch the project disappear, so for me it's just a matter of having now trained myself to be sure the project is really done before I mark the last action done.

[whpalmer4]

One thing you can do is set individual projects (or action groups) to have the opposite setting for auto-complete to what your default is. I have the default set to not auto-complete, because many of my projects fall into the "plan as you go" category, but a significant number of them are created from templates or otherwise fully planned out, so I set them to auto-complete when doing a review. Also, there's nothing stopping you from reactivating a project that was marked complete prematurely.

[Katpaust]

Sorry about not being available since writing the initial post. I have beenon holiday with no internett connection.

in the Outlook Add-in there was a button "next action" to click rather than to check off completed, if you knew there was a follow up action. Clicking this button automatically checked of the previous action as done and created a new action line to fill in with text.

In OF you have to check off then do a quick entry for the next action if you do not want it to enter the same context. However, it may just be a question of getting used to a different way of doing things.

So far I am very pleased with OF and am now really looking forward to getting an IPhone so that I can take OF with me every where I go.

Further ideas will be much appreciated.

[curt.clifton]

Here's how I handle that situation in OF on the desktop:

1. Double click the handle • next to the item, this will open the item's project in a new window. Typically with the item will be selected, but this seems to be somewhat buggy.
2. Select the item if it wasn't automatically selected.
3. Press return to create a new action, enter the details.
4. Press Esc to stop editing, up arrow to move to the original item, and space bar to check it off.
5. Close the window.

That seems like a lot of steps when written out, but I actually find it easy. I'm often doing the first step to check on the status of the project anyway.

One could also use a script to do solve the problem. Something like my Complete and Await Reply script, but that prompted the user for the new action, would work nicely.