[Lizard]

bankomeister: These are both the same thing. The difference in names come from the fact that the icon for these types of projects used to be a bucket. (Now it's more like a shoebox.)

If you select a project and open the inspector, look near the top to see "Type" followed by 3 icons. The blue box on the right represents a "Single Actions" project.

In a sequential project, there is one next action and all other actions are considered unavailable until this action is completed.

In a parallel project, there is one next action, but all the other actions are still available.

In a single actions project, all actions are available and none of them is the next action.

"Mail Holiday Cards" might be a sequential project:
1) Count people to mail cards to
2) Buy cards
3) Prepare cards for mailing
4) Take cards to post office
These actions won't work out of order.

"Clean House" might be a parallel project:
1) Tidy kitchen
2) Tidy bedroom
3) Scrub bathroom
It doesn't matter which one you do first, but they're all still working towards a goal, and having one of them marked 'next' might help you get cleaning.

A single actions project is sort of a concession to the fact that life doesn't always fit in neat little folders and index cards.
"Household repairs" might be a single actions project
1) Oil squeaky hinge
2) Replace hall light
3) Hammer down loose nail on back porch
They are all vaguely related, and there's no other good place to put them. But doing or not doing any one of them really has no effect on the others.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by bankomeister

I am a little confused by all of your suggestions, mainly terminology.

What is a singleton bucket?
What is a single action project?

Two names for the same thing. If you want to make a "container" for a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that don't have anything to do with each other, or a project of tasks that don't have any real ordering, you can make one of these. You can read more about it in the OmniFocus help at Keeping track of single actions or if the link doesn't work, just type "single actions" into the help command in OmniFocus.

Whoops, Lizard beat me to the punch by hours. Don't know why I didn't see his message, maybe the server maintenance had some role in that. As if anyone cares :-)

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by Lizard

In a single actions project, all actions are available and none of them is the next action.

Just to clarify: none of the actions in a single action project is the next action, but all are considered next actions for the purposes of filtering with the View Bar. In other words, if you have the view bar set to show Next Actions, all of your available actions in a single action project will be shown (since they are not dependent on any other actions).