Folder instead of Tasks for Someday

I don’t know if this is a quick fix or not, but right now, when you make a Project “someday” all of the stuff inside the project goes to someday status–that’s good.

What’s not so good for review purposes is that when you go to the someday tab, all the individual tasks in the project are shown, rather than just the parent project.

Would it be hard to make that so that only the project shows in the list? I can’t imagine I’m the only person who has to push a project you’ve planned out to the “someday” pile for whatever reason, and it would be a lot cleaner that way.

I have noticed this problem, too. And there is yet another disadvantage with it: the fact that when you revert the project to an active staus all the tasks are converted from Someday to Next. In other words, you lose all differentiation you once had between the tasks (Next, Waiting, Calendar/Tickler, Someday etc, whatever they were before).

I think one solution would be to be able to turn the project inactive. This would let you keep all the task “type” settings as they are. There could be new checkbox for this, or it could be made permissible to set the Sequential switch for this even at the top level (and possibly change the name of this switch to Inactive for items at the top level.)

Another solution would be to use the Someday setting for the project as a whole, but maintain all the Next,Waiting etc settings for all the individual actions in it, and still suppress all these from their respective lists. I think I prefer the first solution, but neither is perfect.

In my mind there is also a principal difference between an Inactive project and a Someday/Maybe project. The latter is actually Maybe; you have not yet decided whether you will ever do it at all, whereas Inactive usually means “temporarily on hold”; I will do it, but it is not yet the right time, and I have neither a date nor a predecessor to tie it to, so I cannot make it either a Tickler task or a sequentially dependent task; so I have to manage this manually; this manual method and the Tickler method are the only methods described by David Allen; sequential automation is a creative add-on invented by others. Strictly speaking, there should or could be two separate mechanisms for making the project Maybe and making it Inactive (on hold).

Interesting idea. My first thought is what if you have just one task in a project that is marked as someday… You wouldn’t want the top level project to be put into the someday view. So how to handle situations like that.

Maybe only the highest level someday item in the hierarchy could/should be shown… Just thinking out loud…