My goal is to be able to hide entire Action Groups by assigning a Tag whose Status is set to On Hold.
However, when I assign this Tag to an Action Group, and when I’m in Project View and set visibility to Available, the Action Group is still visible if there are Actions that are not also on hold.
Is there any way to force OF to hide the entire Action Group regardless of what Actions are inside it?
What if you set a future defer date? Should get inherited by embedded actions?
@Logan - I’m trying to wean myself off of Defer Dates unless it is something I actually want to show up on that date. Otherwise the items I’m trying to put on hold will all come back to me like an avalanche on the due date!
Unfortunately, not directly using the approach you propose.
A few alternatives come to mind. One is to place the entire project on hold. Another option presumes that the project is sequential. Put a task before the action group (e.g. start upcoming action group) and tag that task. Finally, if the action group is sequential, try placing the tag on the first action in the action group.
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JJW
@DrJJWMac - Thank you, but unfortunately none of those options will work.
I’m open to other methods to achieve my goal. Using Due Dates just kicks the problem down the road.
@mlondon I don‘t see any other options.
EITHER: a future defer date and the action group and everything within it becomes unavailable.
OR: You set the whole project as sequential which makes all action groups within it sequential an only one is active. You‘d have to move all active items (your top level action groups) to a single action group which is set to parallel (not sequential).
I don‘t like both approaches really much. That‘s why I tend to use projects if I need more control.
„Using Due Dates just kicks the problem down the road.“ I have disabled the review date to 2030 to be able to control the review. So, I kicked the date so far the road that it‘s even in another country.
You have discovered the limitation that tags (unlike dates) do not propagate inherently to tasks in action groups. One other option is to tag every action in the action group explicitly with the tag that you want to put on hold. Untag when you want to re-expose those actions.
When you stick with your approach, you have no other options but those mentioned. You could get engaged with scripting through additional buttons to toggle tags or dates on/off if the tedium of doing so manually is a limitation.
Another method is to accept a different goal. You say “streamline the total number of top-level projects”. I suspect you mean to say that you want to reduce the number of top-level projects, not streamline how the flow of tasks in any one project is established. Reconsider whether you can achieve an improved workflow if you design multiple projects as streamlined flows (sequential) of their tasks from start to finish rather than designing one project as a bucket of parallel-running action groups.
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JJW
Along these lines, I use folders to organize my projects. In keeping with GTD principles, I consider a Project to be any discrete outcome that will take more than one concrete step to achieve. Hence, I have a lot of them (138 at the moment, 7 or 8 of which are single action lists). My folders are divided by area of responsibility, and sometimes subareas. Within each folder, I use a combination of flags (for projects that are important but not necessarily urgent), defer dates, and placing projects on hold to ensure that each area is manageable. I try not to over-plan most projects.
Regular reviews are the key to making my system work well, because that’s when I can decide whether to make an on-hold project active, change the defer date, etc.
