How is “Availability” for a project calculated? I figured it would be straightforward, based on the manual, but I’m not seeing what I expect. Here’s what I’m doing.
Make a new perspective with the only rule being “Is a project”. I see all my of projects. ✅
Add “Availability: Available”. The list becomes way smaller. I eventually realized that what’s left are just projects that have no uncompleted actions. As soon as I add an action to the project, is doesn’t pass the “Available” filter (it does still show up if that is set to Remaining) 🤔
Aside from this gumming up one of my perspectives, I’m just not following the logic of why having actions makes a project not available.
I can see the grounds for confusion but this is intended behaviour. The reason you’re seeing so few available projects is that it’s a relatively unusual state for a project to be in. Availability is more commonly thought of in relation to tasks. The concept has its roots in GTD’s “next action” philosophy: can I complete this project in a single step? If not what “next action” pre-requisites can I identify?
I create a “Post to my blog” project, then decide that I need to “select topic”, “research topic”, “draft blog post”, “proof-read draft”, etc. Depending on how you work you might create this subtask list in one step, as a flat, sequential list, or (as I do) tend to think more iteratively in terms of outlines of tasks with nested subtasks. OF can handle either (or indeed a combination of both). The point is that the Available items are the next action items. A task is “masked” from being available (though it’s still “remaining”) either by having uncompleted subtasks in a nested outline or (if a project has been set to sequential rather than parallel in the inspector) by having uncompleted tasks above it at the same level of the outline (or by being “deferred”, but that’s another topic).
As mentioned, an available project will be relatively unusual: it’s either such a simple thing it has no tasks (and never had any), or, as you’ve found, it’s a project where all its tasks have been completed, but it hasn’t itself yet been marked as done: the implication is that it’s 99% done waiting for a final small push to get it over the line (all I need to do now is press “send” on my blog post).
If were to paraphrase, Available sort of implies “You should be able to work on this (not blocked) and can check it off it you’re done (no dependents)”. Your linkage to subtasks really clicked, and this is the behavior I see when I do a test perspective involving tasks and subtasks. So the behavior is consistent up and down the hierarchy (projects being above tasks), it’s just that most of my tasks don’t have subtasks, so it wasn’t as obvious.
Yup, that’s it. As a final twist there’s an option in the inspector to set a flag for given project to automatically complete when its last task is completed: if you set this you’ll never see an available project!
