[lennie]

I will side with hessi on this issue.
I often find myself arbitrarily assigning start & due dates to tasks just so they show up in my due view (all context, due, due, remaining, any duration, any flag) and I can incorporate into my daily workflow (daily OF capture & review, sync to iCal, print to daily Covey planer). These are often "do asap" items but do not have a specific actual due date.

This issue is compounded when an action has an actual due date in the distant future but should be done asap.

[kailas]

Aloha,(I'm in Honolulu...) Lennie: Agreed, those are good strategies. But we are talking apples and pomegranates here. Two completely different processing requirements. You are still in the "world of work" (apples) I'm looking at the "Someday/Maybe" universe (pomegranates) See pgs 167-177 of David Allen's Getting Things Done, where calendarizing such things can be problematic. And I'm not very disciplined constraining blue-sky creative visioning, so am constantly flooding myself with cool "what if, would it be great... oh yeah that might work!" and I really don't want to turn it off, so the only way is to collect it. But to date, I've been running all this into my work lists and that's not working at all.

I think I need to not touch the due date, just use "Start Date" and then make good use of "Available" and we may approach something close to the physical "tickler file". I actually came up with a physical tickler file on my own in the '80's which nearly matches the one described in the book. Basically you are filing input into dated folders in the future. Each day the folder of the day is reviewed you can forward by month or more, depending on how big you make your file. With OF there's no physical limitation: forward something 2 years if you want to... I'm trying to translate that into a strategy the emulates it in OF. An important element is rapid fire collection, you have to get it out of you head asap... and setting it to tickle in the future and in the interim it is completely hidden. "Get 12 Pomegranate trees from Franky's" set to start in July '09. Very easily entered, but then how to make sure all that stuff isn't in your face between now and July? I've just now radically re-folderized my all projects in the side bar... and one of them is "someday/maybe". So that helps. I may adopt the other suggestion made here by (?) and also create a context with the same name. At least, if not hidden, they are clearly sequestered away from the real "world of work." That could be enough. Then with a start date, any review of all available should kick them back into view. I want to be able to add these on my Iphone easily and then on my Mac, never see them until the time comes.