Hi, - I wonder if the community can help me with the following:
I have a complexity in my work, that requiores quite a few projects. Because of this, during my weekly reflection I always consider what projects to work on during the comming week, and what projects to put “On hold” until next week.
Ideally a project will of course allways be set to active if it contains an action with a due date the comming week. HOWEVER, mistakes may happen. This is why I try to set my Forecast / Today view to display any action that is due today, regardless of project status. But I haven’t succeeded.
I have tried:
Adding a special “Break through”-tag to certain important actions, in order to display it on the due date even if it’s project is on hold. This works on regular perspectives, but not in the Forecast.
Flag - does not help, the action is still hidden.
Planned date - does not help, the action is still hidden.
Please note that this is ment as a way to avoid missing important actions when a mistake happens, - I do understand that regularly I will of course not have a project on hold if it contains actions that need to be handled. So, do you have any tips for how to make an action visible in the Forecast / Today, even if the project containing the action is on hold? Or another suggestion to deal with this?
One possible approach (though it would require you to adopt a slightly different workflow) is to work out of the Available rather than the Forecast perspective, using defer-dates rather than “on hold” status to determine whether projects are visible in that view. You can set a future defer date at the whole-project level, or at the level of a task in the project with children, and all “descendants” will inherit the defer date as you’d expect. Setting a future defer date will remove it from the Available perspective: you could increment defer dates one day and they’ll reappear tomorrow, or by whatever longer interval you’re comfortable with before seeing those items again.
You could setup a perspective which shows action items which are “remaining” where the project is “on hold” and the date is in the next 7/14 days then check this as part of your weekly review to ensure anything you want to work on is not accidentally “On Hold” if you do this later in your review there should be little to see there.
Unfortunately, though I was /planning/ to use forecast perspective when 4.8 and planned dates came out, I’ve found it’s just too limited in customization. So I’ve created two custom perspectives for what seems like something very similar to what you’re looking for. First is ‘this week’ which is filtered by a ‘this week’ tag and, importantly, remaining availability. The second is ‘today’ perspective filtered by availability (not remaining), due soon planned for today. This lets me see all the potential tasks I’ve identified for the week in one perspective which I can then either 1) pull to today by assigning a planned date or simply scan the weekly perspective when I’m looking for something to fill time. In any case, forecast simply wouldn’t allow this kind of customization. Does this help? Is it what you’re looking for? For me, it’s important that the weekly task show anything remaining (so I can see options) but daily task list show only what’s actually available and so not clutter too much with non-actionable tasks.
At least in OF 4.8.x, if you have a task that is planned OR due, even if it is unavailable yet, it will show in the forecast view. I often plan to complete a group of tasks, so I set the planned or due date on the parent task and all the tasks will show in the forecast view.
However, if you have the project itself On Hold, that really conveys a different meaning. It might be worthwhile to consider when you do your project reviews to reflect on if there are any due dates for tasks for the project of an ON HOLD project and consider removing the dates or setting the task to available.
My suggestion is that, instead of using On Hold, you add a Defer date to the project. Then any actions in that project with a due date within the “soon” period will show up in the Forecast. Because they are technically unavailable, they will be grayed out, but they will be visible.
As @nielsm observes, a project that is On Hold does not appear in the Forecast. I tend to think that a project to which I might turn as early as next week is not on hold; for me, “on hold” means “set aside for the indefinite future.”
