[jbkendrick]

I would like to create a perspective for completed tasks in which I have the tasks sorted in order by completed date. It appears that sorting on completed only groups tasks into completed vs. not completed order. Is there a way to sort by completed date? Thanks, John

[whpalmer4]

If you are viewing tasks, and not projects with their associated tasks, you want to use context mode, group by completed (or ungrouped), sort by completed, and I think you'll get what you want. The grouping choice doesn't sort the contents of a given group, and if you are in project mode, everything is done on a project basis.

I have a "Completed today" perspective which is context mode, grouped by completed, sort by project, completed actions, all durations and all flag states. The "completed today" group is open, and the rest are closed. Actual completion of complete projects is relatively rare for me because so many of them are ongoing with no fixed endpoint, so sorting by project rather than completion date gets me a better view of where my effort has gone as I'm generally not looking back trying to figure out what I spent my time on a week ago Thursday. If I had to characterize my time use on a daily basis over the last 2 weeks for a timesheet, I would probably sort by completed instead.

[jbkendrick]

@whpalmer4 - that worked great - thanks! The problem with the sorting was that I was in planning mode instead of context mode. I am a bit puzzled about why you cannot sort by complete date, even within a project. Since the option is there, I expected it to provide the same results it does in context mode. Am I just not understanding something about the intended purpose and difference in these two modes? The obvious difference is the project v. context lists in the sidebar, but is there something more? Thanks, John

[curt.clifton]

Project mode is like an outlining program. It represents the "ground truth" ordering for each project. View bar settings in project mode just reorder projects, not the tasks within. You can select tasks in project mode and permanently sort them using the Sort menu items.

Context mode provides a view of your actions, sorting there doesn't affect the ordering within projects. It just changes your view.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by jbkendrick

@whpalmer4 - that worked great - thanks! The problem with the sorting was that I was in planning mode instead of context mode. I am a bit puzzled about why you cannot sort by complete date, even within a project. Since the option is there, I expected it to provide the same results it does in context mode. Am I just not understanding something about the intended purpose and difference in these two modes? The obvious difference is the project v. context lists in the sidebar, but is there something more? Thanks, John

The underlying reason is sequential projects and action groups ought to stay in the right order. If you want to permanently change the ordering, you can do that by selecting a bunch of actions (or projects) and using the Edit->Sort menu, which will rearrange the items as you specify. One way to think about the difference between this and changing the sort settings in the view bar is that the view bar settings are like the column headers in the Finder; if you sort the files a different way in one window, the contents of another window will not be affected. On the other hand, if you use Edit->Sort to reorder some items, those are actual changes made to your database, and if you're using multiple computers or an iPhone/iPod touch, those changes will be synced to the other clients. The overall expectation is that in planning or project mode, you're operating on projects, not individual actions, and so the sorting works on a project basis. In context mode, individual actions are the unit of interest, and the sorting takes them individually.

[jbkendrick]

Thanks Curt and Whpalmer4. I knew I was most likely missing a concept here and your responses clears it up. After reading your explanations, it makes sense that we wouldn't want to reorder tasks within a project unless we could somehow put them back in next action order. Most of my tasks are parallel as I don't want to worry about doing them in order, but I do put them in order by the most likely next action. John