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Apologies if this has already been mentioned (I didn't find anything by searching the forums):

When I "Mark as Reviewed" an action from a list of single actions, the whole list gets marked as reviewed. Shouldn't this function work on an action-by-action basis when it comes to lists of single actions? I think it would make the function much more useful...
 
Yes this is a big problem with SALs right now. The same problem applies to action groups (sub projects). Various solutions have been suggested in the past. We don't know currently, as far as I know, where Omni stands with these issues.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by matt_c View Post
When I "Mark as Reviewed" an action from a list of single actions, the whole list gets marked as reviewed. Shouldn't this function work on an action-by-action basis when it comes to lists of single actions? I think it would make the function much more useful...
I initially had the same reaction, but then I thought to myself, What is the point of a review? It's to ensure that I'm aware of a project (reinforcement through repetition) and have identified the next action that I can take on it.

Since a single action is its own next (and last) action, there's no further task to identify in the review. And if you have scanned over the entire single action list, you've reinforced your memory of them. I don't see what purpose would be served by making the action, as opposed to the list, something that could be marked as reviewed.

If you have some single actions that you would like to mark reviewed, independently of the others, perhaps you should promote them to projects and then break them down into more concrete actions.

Could you give us a specific example or two of how this feature would help?
 
Maybe I'm not think about this correctly, but I see "Mark as Reviewed" as primarily a sort of "remind me later" command. It's like going over a checklist and shoving the less important stuff to the bottom, without crossing anything out...

I guess I'm looking for single actions to behave exactly like projects in this regard, but without having to take the additional step of actually creating a project and giving it a name. During a daily or weekly review, I should be able to look at a single action at the top of my next action list and say "no, not today" without pushing every other single action in the same list to the bottom of the global list with it.
 
brian has it essentially correct. Reviews are for taking a 10,000 ft view of your lists and seeing that everything is order, has next actions if they are projects, and that you are aware of them so that you can make those intuitive, in the moment, priority decisions DA talks about. They are not for postponing a NA, which is I think what you mean by "remind me later." If you want to postpone a task to get it off your radar for the time being, set the start date on the task to some future date. That will do what you want.
 
I don't disagree with you, but it's not clear to me how vital the "Mark as Reviewed" function actually is to the GTD weekly review... Why would you need to mark anything? What the function seems to do is take a project at the top of a "Next to Review" list and shove it to the bottom of the list, without the bother of assigning arbitrary start or due dates (when all you really want to say is "not now"). Regardless of how you end up using that function, it seems to me that, given that a single action list is essentially a list of single action projects, it makes little sense to shove that whole list to the bottom. Especially if you aren't bothering to sort related single actions into separate lists.

I guess what I'm saying here is that I don't think what anyone has written here is wrong, per se, but none of it really seems to me to explain why this function behaves the way it does.
 
One more clarification: I've been playing around with Things today, and I see they have a feature that is more or less what I wanted from "Mark as Reviewed": There is a "Next" and a "Today" tray, and you can move every next action that you want to do today into the today tray to focus on it. This is sort of what I wanted to do with "Mark as Reviewed" (actually, it's sort of the mirror image): everything I'm not going to focus on today gets shoved to the bottom of the list, and only the things I want to do today remain at the top... The problem, again, being that if there are single actions I don't want to do today, I need to either leave them up top with everything else, or shove the single actions that I do want to do today down to the bottom...
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by matt_c View Post
…I've been playing around with Things today, and I see they have a feature that is more or less what I wanted from "Mark as Reviewed"…
I've tested Things extensively (see comments here) and I'm convinced that its "Today" collection is really nothing more than another way to flag actions and projects, which you can do in OmniFocus as well. Except that OmniFocus' flag feature is more flexible because it's not limited to meaning only "Today". It's a marker that can mean anything you want.

But I happen to use it similarly to Thing's "Today" collection, but my flags actually mean "in the very near future".

Each morning, or sometimes during my weekly review, I flag items that need immediate attention while I'm browsing in planning mode. I then have a perspective in context mode that displays only my flagged items, providing me with a nice, short list of the most important actions.

The Review feature in OmniFocus is really intended for something different than what you're doing. The Review feature is designed to support David Allen's concept of weekly reviews in GTD, as jonwalthour described above.
 
Actually, using the inspector, you can have projects show up at the top of your review list much more regularly than once a week. It seems to me that the function is meant to be much more flexible than you imply. And again, I don't think saying "it's for the weekly review only" really explains why every single action should be treated as belonging to the same project during a weekly (or daily or whatever) review. The arguments I've seen so far actually seem to be arguments against using the "Mark as Reviewed" function at all, not against having OF treat actions on a single action list as single action projects. But I like the "Mark as Reviewed" function; I just don't understand why it behaves the way it does with single action lists.

In any case, I am finding Things much more intuitive in this and a number of other regards. I think I will stick with it for now, and maybe revisit OF when the battling iPhone apps come out.

Thanks for your help.
 
 


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