Filtering in GTD should not only be about what you see. Much more important should be what you don’t see. You don’t want to clog your mind with stuff you cannot do anything about at the moment.
Therefore in my opinion following things need improvement:
As I already wrote here : Please only show tags, that are used in the list you are currently working on. If that is not possible, at least separate tags per area. I
don’t think it’s helpful to see e.g. all of your coworkers and clients, when you’re working on private stuff at home.
Invert tag filters as already possible with the area filters or even better have “NOT”-filters. If you see the list of next actions, and some of them require people or assets that are not available right now, you need a way to get them out of view.
Don’t get me wrong: I haven’t used any GTD app, that got that near to perfection and I can already work well with GTDnext. But those things still are annoying.
Has anyone else ideas for improving the filters? How do you work with them?
I totally agree. Being able to reduce, compress or even eliminate certain information - without thereby hiding anything vital - would be an important area of development, I believe. As you say, no other app is particularly good at this either, so there would seem to exist a golden opportunity to be first.
For example, you mentioned “NOT-filtering”. So easy to implement (just like for areas; a plain and simple inversion of the default OR filtering). It would let you eliminate only precisely the things that you do not want to see right now, but without hiding virtually everything on the list which is what happens if you select a tag with ordinary filtering. And it would allow you to cut down immensely on the amount of tagging you need to do.
In short, I believe that the feeling of overwhelm and the fear of missing something, and the annoyance of having to repeatedly scan through immense lists of actions, is one of the main factors that scare people away from GTD and make them resort to regular calendar-type scheduling instead.
Elimination filtering (NOT filtering) in combination with Batching, Grouping and visible Attention levels would be a powerful set of tools to deal with this.
And I totally also agree that tags that are not in use need not be displayed on top.
