If I select Next Actions in the left hand pane, the action icon of every item in the middle pane is grey even though if the action is set to Active.
GTDNext has a terminology of its own. I don’t know why. It makes it all harder to understand.
Gray and Green is (or should be) a flag showing whether the item is shown on its “active” list or not (Next or Waiting etc) .
I simply do not get why they call the next actions “active” while being “inactive/subsequent”.
EDIT:
Sorry Ike, I misunderstood. You were probably talking about the icon on the left side of the task (the one that looks like a picture of a list). On the Waiting and Someday lists these have colors that match the gradient color on the right, but on the Next actions list (and also Inbox) these color indications are absent. Not that they are necessary on any of those lists, but I believe it would be best to keep it consistent with the colors in the outline views.
I was referring to the other green/gray icon on the right, the one with an N in it that indicates whether a task is “active” or “inactive” in a more general sense. This icon seems to have changed, or maybe I remember wrong how it was before. Anyway, it does not seem to work as I believe it should. It does not seem to have any effect at all for delegated (Waiting For) actions. These actions now do not seem to be able to be held up by other actions that precede them, nor can the icon be made green anymore. It is always gray (“inactive/invisible/sequential”) but still show up immediately on the Waiting For list. You can give them the little extra red F, but this has no effect as they are visible anyway. I think the whole sequential/parallel mechanism has been in need of an overhaul all along, but I think at least it used to work a little bit more appropriately and consistently for Waiting For actions than it does now.
Good catch! I’ve created an issue for this in our system. Thanks!
1 Like
How about the fact that Waiting For actions do not seem to be capable of being sequentialized anymore (I think they were at some stage)?
IMO the sequentialization mechanism should operate consistently regardless of “type” (Next, Waiting etc). Consistent behavior is always easier to understand, but not only because of that. In the case of Waiting For actions it is also the case that these are in fact a kind of Next action - somebody else’s next action, e.g. a delegated action. They most definitely can be sequentially dependent in the same way that our own next actions can be.