[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by runawayjim

Seems to me that people are trying to use an available-action and a next-action filter at the same time.

By going to context view, you can use the context filter to set available and the availability filter to set next-action and achieve this. But this doesn't seem to work in project view.

Are the context filter and project filter different in how they treat "active"? It seems like they are since in project view, with project filter set to active, I get unavailable actions. But in context view, with context filter set to "active", I do not get any unavailable actions.

From a GTD perspective, this makes sense to me as it is from the context perspective that one should be considering what next action to perform.

The sidebar filter (aka Project Filter) set to active in project mode nets you projects that are active, whether or not they have any available actions. Then the Availability Filter winnows down the list based on what you choose. Active&Available will show you the available actions from the active projects. Active&Next Action will show you the next actions from the active projects. Active&Remaining will show you everything left to do in the active projects, whether or not it is available. Most of the time, especially if you use sequential projects, I think Active & Remaining is the most useful choice for Project mode because you want to see the structure.

If you have a sequential project, and one of the blocked actions is assigned to a context which also has available actions, then you would see unavailable actions in context mode while viewing active contexts, provided you were viewing remaining actions.

I tend to shy away from the Active Contexts setting in favor of Remaining Contexts because the display can change so much — I would rather filter out unavailable actions by choosing Available in the Availability filter rather than have some unknown number of remaining actions already hidden from me. I think it is a somewhat less confusing approach until you really have a good handle on how all the filters interact, and by that time, you're used to it so there's no need to change :-)