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Anomoly? Sort order of Projects with start dates & Children w/o them in Context View Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Does this behavior seem odd to anyone else?

I'm in context view. I'm grouping by start date. I'm sorting by start date. The availability filer is set to Remaining.

Let's say I've got a project with a start date of 9/15/2011. It's got ten children actions. None of those have a start date, so they inherit the project's start date.

When I go to the "starting next month" section of the layout I see a list of the children actions with no start date, followed by the project header at the end with a start date attached.

Am I the only person for whom this seems backwards? Wouldn't it make more sense to have the project with start date first and then a list of the child actions relating to that project heading underneath it? Or at least the option to organize things that way? Or am I missing something?

KS
 
The underlying notion is that you check off sequential items starting at the top of the list and work your way down. When you've finished all of the items on the list, you check off the parent as completed (it isn't shown as available until all of the children are complete, and if you were looking at an available or next action view, it wouldn't even show up until that point).

If you look at the same display on the iPad or iPhone app, where you don't get grouping in big chunks like you do on the Mac as you go farther out, but rather day-by-day groups, it is more apparent that those actions not showing a start date become available on 9/15—in fact, the only way you can tell that they don't have their own start date assigned is to look in the inspector.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
The underlying notion is that you check off sequential items starting at the top of the list and work your way down. When you've finished all of the items on the list, you check off the parent as completed (it isn't shown as available until all of the children are complete, and if you were looking at an available or next action view, it wouldn't even show up until that point).

If you look at the same display on the iPad or iPhone app, where you don't get grouping in big chunks like you do on the Mac as you go farther out, but rather day-by-day groups, it is more apparent that those actions not showing a start date become available on 9/15—in fact, the only way you can tell that they don't have their own start date assigned is to look in the inspector.
That makes sense I guess. But where the level of granularity of the disclosure area is greater than one day, it can be a little hard to intuit what the start date of an action is if it inherits its start date from the Project (and there fore has no listed start date in start date field, This is exacerbated when the Project is underneath it. If the mac app behaved more like the iphone and ipad apps, that wouldn't be a problem. But it seems like that mac app should account for this somehow (perhaps with a preference of some kind or something to allow people to set up in a way that works best for them). Or in the alternative, they should adopt the methodology of the mobile apps and break things out day by day.

I think this may be one of the reasons why I haven't used start dates consistently. The easiest way to quickly defer an entire project is to just push the start date of the project forward.

But for planning purposes, you may want to look at things at more of task level in context view, to see what tasks will be starting a particular day.

If you are looking at starts next week, and the tasks inherit a start date, there's no easy way to get a granular start date for a ask without switching to project view. Or am I missing something?

KS
 
 


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