I can’t think of a simple feature request for this so I’ll put it as a “wish” (and maybe someone can propose a workaround):
I’d like to be able to set individual actions from on-hold projects to active.
I basically have two types of projects:
- Interrupt-driven or maintenance-type projects, which are always active. I do the actions in those projects as they come up.
- Long-term improvement projects. I usually keep those projects on-hold until, during a review, I activate one or two of them to work on next.
For example, I have an “OmniFocus” project, where I have all kinds of ideas for improving my use of OmniFocus - read a bunch of articles, write a few notes to myself, experiment with estimated durations, etc. This project is currently on-hold. At some point, probably in a few months, I’ll activate it for a day or two and do all of those things in one batch.
However, every now and then a maintenance-type activity comes up for one of these long-term projects. For example, for my OmniFocus project, I need to pay for OmniFocus 3 and also make one change to my custom perspectives, and I don’t want to wait with these small but more urgent things until my next big OmniFocus detour.
How do people handle this?
For the past week or two I’ve been using a “Now” tag which I attach to such actions. Then, in my custom perspectives, I filter for:
- All of the following:
- Availability: Remaining
- Any of the following:
- Availability: Available
- Tagged with any of: Now
- Status: Due Soon
This isn’t bad, but it has a few drawbacks:
- I need to access these actions exclusively through custom perspectives, and not for example through the Tags built-in perspective (which I have set to only show available actions).
- Projects with such actions are always collapsed in the custom perspective view.
- The action is grayed out.
Another idea is to have two separate projects, for example “OmniFocus” and “OmniFocus Maintenance”, and always keep the “Maintenance” project active. This also has a few drawbacks, though - it adds a layer of hierarchy to my database, and it makes reviews more awkward. Conceptually, these are one project.
Is these another better way to do this?