Filter Active Items - a useful feature I hadn't taken advantage of before

[ike9898]

I really try to offload the entire "to do" part of my brain into GTD, so I'm very inclusive and jot down things that I'd like to do even it there's a good change that I will never get to many of them. Consequently, I have a lot of things set as Someday in GTDNext. When scanning through the system to decide what I should work on next, I've started to find that the grey items we're sort of distracting; I don't need to see these things multiple times per day. The solution I stumbled on is the Filter Active Items button:

Hiding inactive items is consistent with the spirit of GTD; Someday items are something that you might want to look at during your periodic review, but not more often than that. So now I leave leave this filter selected by default.

One thing that I don't like about this approach is that it also hides Waiting items. For me at least, Waiting items are things I need to be thinking about now, just as much as Active items. When you delegate tasks, you can't be passive about things you are waiting on. So, ideally I'd prefer filters that would allowing me to see Active and Waiting, while hiding Someday.

[mahony2k]

One thing that I don't like about this approach is that it also hides Waiting items. For me at least, Waiting items are things I need to be thinking about now, just as much as Active items. When you delegate tasks, you can't be passive about things you are waiting on. So, ideally I'd prefer filters that would allowing me to see Active and Waiting, while hiding Someday.

Yes, that really is a problem. More than once I stumbled upon a task that just didn't want to show up the green "next" icon although it was the first task in the project. It took me a while to understand, that it wasn't the first but the second item in the list. The first one was on "Waiting" and filtered out.

If it filters "Waiting" items, it has to filter the following tasks too. Otherwise it gets very confusing!

[James]

So it sounds like people would like to have the Active button show both Active items and Waiting items. Or is it just you two that want that.

[mahony2k]

Either this or hide the rest of the task chain that cannot be dealt with because the first task is waiting and hidden.

When you filter by active items, you try to achieve something. Either you want to see all items that are active as in "can be worked on" or as in "running project / not someday". With this filter both fails. You see tasks of projects that cannot be worked on but you also don't see the whole project to review it.

How you decide to solve it is up to you and I could live with either way. But as it is it doesn't make any sense.

[Folke]

I agree with mahony2k and ike9898. It is very useful to be able to see next actions and waiting for actions together. the key factor that these two have in common is the fact that they could happen anytime now - either if I happen to find myself in the right context for it (to actually do a next action) or if someone else decides to deliver (a waiting for action).

As for where and how there are probably many options:

• a filtering button mode in the long outline view (Projects and Actions)
• an include button in the Next and Waiting lists to "include Waiting" and "include Next" respectively
• a saved search that does this and which you can place a link for up in a convenient place such as among the other main links near the top of the left menu if it is a view you expect to use very often

I also agree with Ike that the full list of actions (the outline) is usually too long anyway to look at, and by its very nature it is organized by project, subproject etc. It is mainly useful for organizing all your stuff into the right buckets etc for sequencing tasks within projects etc, but not always the most natural way to see what you need to see right now during the day. I therefore believe that the Next and Waiting lists (or saved searches) is perhaps a better platform for implementing innovations like this one, and various other grouping and sorting options that could be handy.

[ike9898]

"It is very useful to be able to see next actions and waiting for actions together. the key factor that these two have in common is the fact that they could happen anytime now"

Since it hasn't been mentioned specifically, I'll just point out that Scheduled tasks are not something that can happen anytime now, and so logical shouldn't be included in this Next and Waiting view.