[curt.clifton]

Originally Posted by watchit

It is really cumbersome to have to go to the Action Inspector and click on the Start date field and write Today or Now all the time.

I don't have much to add to the larger proposal—the current filtering options work fine for me—but wanted to make sure you were aware that you can add a start date column to any perspective. No need then to use the inspector to change start dates. (I don't intend to discount your proposal, which may be useful to many. I just wanted to make sure you know about all the features that are currently available.)

[whpalmer4]

And in the same spirit as Curt's comment, if you are using the inspector, you can do a large number of actions at once by building up the selection in the usual Mac OS X fashion, opening the inspector and typing in the (new) date.

I'm curious about the usefulness of auto-rollover of start dates. To me, it's pretty much a binary condition -- started, or not started. If I could start on something yesterday, but didn't, why would I need to change the start date to today? It's still going to be on my list of available tasks. How would adjusting the start date (automatically or manually) benefit me, besides possibly disguising the fact that I don't always get to work on something as soon as it is first possible to do so?

[watchit]

Thanks curt & whpalmer4.
Yes, I use the Start column most of the time but I was mainly referring to applying a Start Date to several Activities at once, hence the mention of the Activity Inspector Start field.
My reason for highlighting the need for an extension of the Availability Filter to include "Started" and "Started or Due", etc, is... like a lot of people, I use Start Dates to determine what I'm going to do today, so I don't want to see Actions that don't have start dates and that's not possible with many views. OF currently limits that possibility to Grouping by Start and then closing the "Start any time" group. Any other view is littered with Actions that have no start date. For me, that's a visual mess and limits the Perspectives that I can use. One of the salient points of Allen's GTD theory is to think about things once, during Processing, and then not think about it again until Review, so I don't want to have to turn Flags off and on... that's a clumsy solution.
whpalmer4, regarding the usefulness of auto-rollover of Action start dates, I don't see this as important as the need for more options in the Availability Filter. In fact, it's another possible work-around to solve the same problem. I agree, it's a binary condition... I want to see things as either started or not, but to view Actions with start dates I must Group by Start Date, and I end up with lots of groups with different sets of start dates... again a visual mess.
I want to be able to see just those items with current Start Dates in a variety of Perspectives. I think a lot of other people who are not power users might like that as well.

[gdevore]

Dennis-
Thanks so much for pointing this out to me. I can finally manage my "Today" list in OF! Being able to reorder things would be nice but isn't crucial. I didn't use flags at all before so now I am pretty much using flags to mark things for today. If I want to defer something I just set the start date out to the date I need. It works great. Thanks so much.

I should say, this would really stink for a new user. The amount of customization required to get a simple today list seems like too much work. Hopefully something they will address in 2.0.

[reallyseth]

I've got a solution (albeit semi-manual) to custom order my tasks.

Here's the setup: I've got a "Today" perspective that shows Due or Flagged items and I sort the perspective by task name. At the beginning of the day I add letter's and numbers in brackets at the beginning of each task (e.g. [A1], [A2], [B1], [B2], etc.). This sorts my tasks in the order I want. The letters correspond loosely to the Franklin-Covey Quadrants. A being urgent and important, B being urgent not important, and C being important but not urgent. The numbers correspond to the order I am planning to accomplish them in. Then the next day if I have left over tasks that I didn't get to, I do a find and replace using this regular expression "\[[ABC][1-9]+\]" to remove yesterdays priorities, and start fresh.

This solves the order and priority issue (at least for the Today perspective). Hypothetically you could use any naming convention you want to specify priority and order.

It's not as easy as drag and drop, but it works, and isn't that difficult.