[zedboy]

There's one situation I encounter a lot, and that's where the ability to start or continue one project depends on the outcome of another project.

I'll give a concrete example. I'm planning my wedding (well, *we're* planning a wedding, but never mind that). I have several things that are considered separate sub-projects of "Get married", like "Choose venue for wedding", "Choose date for wedding", "create guest list", "Send invitations", etc. etc.

Now, I can't send invitations until I know the date of the wedding and the guest list, and I can't know the date of the wedding until we choose the venue. So I would like the "send invitations" project to not appear until both of those projects are completed.

I realize this can be handled by action groups, but this feels somewhat wrong to me – it's a project all it's own, not an action group. (I guess I think of action groups as "I have this 2 or 3 step project to do and don't want to create a whole project for it.")

So how do you handle these kind of dependencies?

[ext555]

so far only with action groups .. what you're describing is more likely to occur with omni's project management app .. " omni plan "

but that app is still in the early stages of it's life also . Mulitple projects in one file isn't available yet .

[brianogilvie]

ext555 is right to mention OmniPlan. If you have complex dependencies and you need to know the critical path for a project, it (or one of its many competitors--I like Omni but I'm not a shill) is the way to go. The Omni folks have plans to integrate OF with OmniPlan but not in 1.0.

If you don't want to go that far, though, I'd be tempted to make "Get Married" the project and use actions or action groups for the various steps. My reason is that the successful outcome of "Get Married" is clearly defined and represents a final outcome; "send invitations" is not an independent project in the sense that finishing it would be satisfying even if the wedding never took place. (Rather the contrary, I hope!)

[brianogilvie]

A quick followup: in an earlier thread, the notion of cloned actions (one action that exists in more than one project) was suggested as a way to handle such dependencies without going for a full-blown project manager. It's not yet a feature but if it means a lot to you, you might suggest it to the Omni team.

[ext555]

I'm definitely not a shill either , but having tried Merlin2 .. I plunked down the cash for omni plan with good faith that the Omni Folks will eventualy make it all it can be . I actually use it quite differently and put all my projects in one omni plan document as " tasks " with the project tasks as " sub tasks ". this enables me to plan out my project load on a weekly basis and not overcommit myself as much as I used to . Hopefully in the not too distant future I'll be able to export omni focus projects to O-plan